The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America

Rating:
Summary: Agree with rockgeek56
Review: I got this book after greatly enjoying "A Walk in the Woods." I had been so interested with that book I wanted to hike the Appalachian Trail!
This book was just the opposite. Bryson provides a disappointing description of his travels around the United States, picking on most of the places he visits by highlighting their lowlights.

Rating:
Summary: Another mean-spirited book
Review: I had hoped for a humorous look at America but was stunned to find caustic remarks instead. This reminds me Bill Kaufmann's book Dispatches from the Muck Dog Gazette. There is no affection for small towns here. For some reason, the authors of both books find it amusing to bash small towns instead of embracing them for what they are. I'm barely three chapters into the book and plan on tossing it. I will not buy another Bill Bryson book again.

Rating:
Summary: Bryson's Awkward Early Effort
Review: That old saw, "you can never go home" has rarely been more in evidence than in this book by then-expatriate Bryson. Having lived England for over a decade, he decides to return to his native Iowa and embark on a hazily conceived cross-country road trip. The "road trip" is a distinctly American invention, born of the combination of affluence, the interstate highway system, and the size of America. It's usually invoked as a framework on which to build a tale of discovery, and here Bryson intends to rediscover and ostensibly celebrate small-town America. Touching base in Des Moines to see his mother, he sets out to locate a real-life version of the perfect movie-set small towns of his childhood films.

He begins the trip with frequent stories about his now-dead father, who would drag the family on horrendous family vacations each summer. Unfortunately, his father merely comes across as a cliche bumbling father, always getting lost, too proud to ask for directions, stingy, and choleric toward the equally cliche kids in the back seat. Thankfully as Bryson moves outside of the zone of his childhood vacations, stories of his father disappear. This allows the meat of the book to emergeósmall town America. And in Bryson's eyes, it's not a pretty scene. It doesn't take long for him to realize that chain stores have spread their tentacles across the land and places that might have once have character are now becoming anonymous assemblages of strip malls and parking lots. Because Bryson's been overseas, he assumes a stunned "what happened!?" attitude to this transformation. What happened is the inexorable intersection of a capitalist economy with a consumer society, where chain operations enjoy the economies scale that allow them to offer the cheapest prices to the consumer, who naturally responds. Bryson (rightfully) rails against the loss of character and individuality this engenders in communities across the country. Of course, this is a trend that has only increased in the fifteen years since the book first appeared, and there's little end in sight.

To be sure, Bryson's account is not meant to be a fair-minded, clinical observation. Clearly intended for a British audience, Bryson is always keen to make a broad generalization, cheap joke, snide jibe, or catty comment about what and who he encounters. While this is sometimes entertaining, it often crosses into sheer mean-spiritedness. A particular target of his is the overweight, which he seems to believe is a uniquely American phenomenonórich, when you see statistics suggesting that the British are on their way to passing Americans in the obesity stakes. In any event, there's lots of haranguing about fast food, bad food, scummy hotels, lame tourist traps, and the interchangeability of so many small towns. Eventually, he realizes that the perfect town doesn't exist (although there are three or four he ends up really liking), and he'll have to piece it together in his head from the standout parts of different places.

The 14,000 mile, 38 state (he doesn't get to the deep south, the Pacific Northwest, or the upper northeast) trip isn't very useful per se. Anyone who knows nothing about the backroads of America is going to be horrified, anyone who has a bad opinion about the backroads of America will find plenty of confirmation, and anyone who likes the backroads of America (or lives there) will probably be infuriated. Ultimately, much of the book has a kind of distasteful elitist tone to it, when Bryson does stumble across something he likes, it's treated as an unexpected boon that's all the more shocking for being in the hinterland. I've read almost every one of his other books, and for the most part, greatly enjoyed them, but this isn't of nearly the same quality.