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Summary: Bill Bryson commits the worse sin - HE IS NOT FUNNY!
Review: I was given "The Lost Continent" by a dear friend of mine who lives in the UK and has been a Bryson fan for years. I was anticipating a sharp, wicked and biting commentary on America today. Instead I read all that I could on the plane back to the US before finally throwing it aside in disgust. It was so painfully awful an experience that I have not fully forgiven my well meaning, but completely misguided friend.Bryon returns to America after years of living, happily it seems, in England. He attempts to find the perfect small town and document his travels and adventures along the way, but by the time he reached my home states of Virginia, Maryland and Delaware, I had my doubts that he had even journeyed the places he mentions. His anecdotes are so obviously self contrived that I kept waiting for a Dave Barry like insertion of "This REALLY did happen!" or "I swear that THIS part is true!" I am sure that there is a waitress in rural America who still has her own teeth, but Bryson was hard pressed to encounter one. Let's face it - it is easy to make fun of the rural South, but Bryson seems stymied for ammunition without refering to the horrors of racial strife in the past - curiously he never encounters a single instance of racial conflict. He is stopped by a thickly accented policeman who asks how he is enjoying his trip, and is "wink-wink" amazed to leave the encouter without being shot. HELLO! Busing in Boston! Shootings in Bed Stuy, NY! You would think that Bryson hadn't read a newspaper in the last 20 years. I think the incident that irked me most was his condensending attitude toward some young women who had never heard of Thomas Hardy, and yet he brags of never having read Faulkner. WILLIAM FAULKNER for god's sake - and Bryson professes to be a writer?! Perhaps a copy of the Cliff Notes might help him dig through "The Sound and the Fury" but then, that might require him to actually learn something true and real about the American South. I haved lived in the US all my life, but I have worked for major British companies for the last 4 years. I have also spent a small amount of time in the UK and I belive that I have some understanding of the differences that seperate our cultures. It seems to me that Bryson's mean spirited writings are driven by his own insecurities. Face it baby, you are one of us no matter how much time you spend in London and no matter how rounded you now form your vowels.
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Summary: SO HARSH, BUT SO REAL !
Review: JUST READ THIS BOOK ON A PLANE GOING BACK TO FRANCE, SPEND SOME WEEKS IN THE DEEP NOWHERE FROM THE DEEP AMERICA, THIS VIEW POINT REFLECTS EXACTLY WHAT AN EUROPEAN CAN FEEL ABOUT UNITED STATES : A MELT OF LOVE (YES, REALLY !) AND IRONY ABOUT WHAT THE EUROPEAN ARE GOING TO CHANGE. C'EST A LA FOIS UNE CRUELLE SATIRE DE L'AMERIQUE PROFONDE MAIS AUSSI UNE VISION EFFRAYEE DE CE QUE SONT (OU VONT DEVENIR) LES EUROPEENS.
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Summary: Entertaining trip around America
Review: Having read a part of his new book "Notes from a big Country-1998" I was inspired to grab anything he wrote. This book in not as funny as his latest, which dissappointed me as I bought it for humour,but all the same it held my interest. As a book on travel, it does get a bit slow part way through, but pressing on was worth it. I can't wait to read another of his books. Being his first they can only get better.
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Summary: A Pseudo-intellectual diary
Review: Mean-spirited meandering, arrogant, and self-absorbed.... Confuses ridicule with humor. Since Bryson moved to England and "became" cultured, he appears to view America as a vast wasteland populated with cretinous unwashed bumpkins. Try as I might, I could not bring myself to finish this awful book. I strongly suggest you find your reading pleasure elsewhere.
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Summary: An affectionate account of life in small town America
Review: I have only been to America once in my life (the obligatory trip to Disneyland). Reading Bill Bryson's experiences in small town America has sparked a yearning to return. His accounts of the people he met and the places he visited are both very funny and display a great deal of warmth towards his country and fellow citizens. (I look forward to him visiting Australia in the not to distant future and 'taking the piss' out of us!!-to quote an Aussie expression). In the meantime I will be brushing up on my southern dialect and I look forward to 'mahking the skwayer' some day in Savannah!!
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Summary: American Caustic
Review: This is the sort of book that prompts one to ask, "what is the purpose of travel writing?" Should it inform us about places we will never go and people we will never meet? Amaze us with tales of grandeur and exotica? Must travel writers seek out and celebrate the remaining pockets of difference and distinction in a world all too quickly tending toward homogeneity? Or should they seek to unite us, teasing out threads of common human experience from beneath the misunderstanding and fear that so often blanket us when we contemplate The Other. Of course, good travel writing -- from the journeys of Herodotus in a Mediterranean-centered world to Eric Newby high in the Hindu Kush or Redmond O'Hanlon deep in Borneo -- does all of these things, and entertains us in the process. Not, alas, Bill Bryson -- his highest aim is to entertain, and this he manages to do roughly on the level of an extended fart joke. In this book, Mr Bryson - an American who lives in England - goes on a car journey across the continental United States. He travels alone, staying in motels and eating in restaurants. Some evenings he finds a comfortable bed or an acceptable meal. These times, he is happy and he says nice things. Much more often, however, Bill Bryson isn't happy. He dislikes the big cities, which he finds very big. He also dislikes the small towns, yes, for their smallness. He despises equally the conveniences of tourist towns and the inconvenience of towns that do not cater to tourists. He finds the East is too industrial, the West too cold and empty; the South is unpleasantly hot; there is too much corn in Iowa. On and on he goes. Everywhere, he finds stupid people. When Bill Bryson is unhappy, which is most of the time, he vents his spleen on whatever town or city happens to disappoint him. Occasionally, his invective is amusing; more often, it is predictable and juvenile. A sample of the Bryson wit, picked more or less at random: "... his name wasn't Mr Toerag, of course. It was Mr Superdickhead." As a humorist, Bill Bryson specialises in easy targets. Overweight Americans are particular favourites, as are those with regional accents. Here is a conversation between Mr Bryson and a Mississippi police officer, both of whom are in their cars, stopped at a stoplight: ... he said, "How yew doin'?" This so surprised me that I answered, in a cracking voice, "Pardon?" "I said how yew doin'?" Bryson responds that he is fine, and the officer asks if he is on vacation. "Yup." "Hah doo lack Miss Hippy?" "Pardon?" "I say, `Hah doo lack Miss Hippy?'" I was quietly distressed. The man was armed and Southern and I couldn't understand a word he was saying to me. "I'm sorry," I said, "I'm kind of slow, and I don't understand what you're saying." "I say" - and he repeated it more carefully - "how doo yew lack Mississippi?" It dawned on me. "Oh! I like it fine! I like it heaps! I think it's wonderful. The people are so friendly and helpful." I wanted to add that I had been there for an hour and hadn't been shot at once, but the light changed and he was gone, and I sighed and thought, "Thank you, Jesus." So Bryson escapes from his brush with the law, but not from his stereotype of the South (or from any of the many other stereotypes of Americans). The above conversation, almost the longest in the book, is one of the few times Bryson talks to someone who isn't a waitress (another group he delights in mocking). Perhaps we should feel pity for Bill Bryson as he drives around America, completely failing to engage with its people or to penetrate beyond the its service industries and, occassionally, museums. But he gives us very little reason to do so. Bill Bryson appears no deeper than his own shallow lampooning. For a part of this book, Bryson is retracing the family vacations of his childhood. But in bringing these earlier adventures to life, he relies on more of the two-dimensional caricaturing that so fails to animate the rest of the book: his mother, says Bryson, spoke only to feed the family ("Another sandwich, dear?"). His father, more fully characterised, manages to be both the most interesting and the most sympathetic person in the book. Every summer, it seems, Bryson senior would load his wife and children into the car and drive off across the continent in search of history, beauty or adventure. Although rudely depicted by his son as a skinflint, barely able to read a map, Bill Bryson's father appears to have been a man who was passionate about his country. In one scene, he is described spending an entire afternoon pacing off troop movements on some historic battlefield (much to the boredom of his son, of course). And, we are told, he frequently engaged in long, involved conversations with the strangers he happened to meet. Bryson senior was, in other words, a pretty good traveller. Too bad he didn't write a book.
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Summary: If you're an American and enjoy being dissed, dig in.
Review: Bryson is an American ex-patriot (or at least he was when he wrote this) living in the UK. He had written a travelogue in the UK that skewered much of life in the countryside, and he came back to the US to do the same here. His claim is that he's looking for "Amalgam", the perfect small town. Unfortunately, Bryson sees the world backwards through the eyes of a ten year old kid. He's constantly putting down what America has become because it just doesn't compare with what he remembered it as when he was on vacation as a kid. Here's a news flash, Bill -- nothing does. We sit back on our laurels and bitch about how the Walmartization of America has destroyed small town commerce, all the time whining because you can't buy gasoline before noon on Sundays. The world has changed, and just because the guy who ran "Cockroach World" has been run out of business by Disney World, it's not necessarily a bad thing. Bryson manages to make it most of the way around the country (he hits 38 states), pissing and moaning the whole way about anything that isn't 1) free, 2) fitting with his view of what society should be, and 3) unchanged since his Dad drove him there 30 years earlier. The book is amusing in large part, but it's the Don Rickles type of humour -- if you don't take an insult well, you'll have a hard time with this. But it's a quick read, and from a nostalgia standpoint, Bryson is spot on.
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Summary: One of the most enjoyable books I've read in a long time
Review: This book was given to me by a friend who knew that 1) I enjoy this style of sarcastic humor, and 2) I'm from Iowa. Bryson perfectly captures that strange mixture of fondness and boredom that I experience when I think of the Midwest and of those family vacations to someplace else. Forget all those comments that Bryson spent too much time in England; his perspective is uniquely American. My only regret about this book is that he didn't spend more time skewering my adopted state of California. I'm looking forward to reading Bryson's other books.
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Summary: Mean spirited review of Americans
Review: I thought this had great potential to be an extremely entertaining book. Mr. Bryson however has spent too much time in England away from his beloved Midwest. He was right that the people in the Midwest are the most hospitable that you can meet, however each state has wonderful people if you are a wonderful person. His view on America and Americans was funny at times but mostly just mean and vindictive when he didn't feel his was treated to even his low standards.
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Summary: Bryson's whining and sarcastic comments get old
Review: Bryson, an expatriot from London, comes to America for a swing through 38 states. He whines, through sarcastic humor, about what a terrible place most of america is, with its strip malls or dead country towns. Then he hits historical places, and he whines that it is too expensive to visit the place, so he doesn't; never mind that it is expensive to run these places. He whines about how terrible the food is and how we americans don't like to walk. The billing of the book is an expat who views america after having been gone for many years. I would have rather he just stayed away and not written the book!!! If you want to read a good travel book, see Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson or On the Road, Jack Kerouac.
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