Rating: 
Summary: Pessimistic, but on target.
Review: Someone once said, "You can't go back home."I don't remember who it was, but American ex-patriot Bill Bryson will tell you, along with a thousand other completely useless, amusing facts. I also don't know whether or not Bryson proves it or not on his cross-country trek across thirty-eight of the lower forty-eight states. Starting from his hometown of Des Moines, Iowa, Bryson drags you along with him through the Midwest, the Deep South, the Mid-Atlantic states, and the Northeast in his old Chevy Chevette. Keeping mostly to U.S. highways and back roads (*shudders*), Bryson' sometimes sarcastic and witty, sometimes droll and dry humour keeps you entertained as you bounce along Mississippi bridges, cotton fields, and forests looking for the perfect small town from his childhood memories (or Hollywood - either would do). Two thirds of the book is spent on the East, then the last section, again starting from Des Moines, heads south and west. I can see why so little time is spent on this section of the country: there are cities, and then nothing - not much to write about. Bryson keeps you interested with the idiosyncracies of people from different areas, and you can tell that he is getting homesick for the friendliness and familiarity of Iowa. I think, by the end of the book, anyhow, that Bryson probably disagrees with our unknown quote. Bryson's humour is distinctly British and appropriately crotchity. You have to appreciate the dryness and honesty of it (he sometimes reminds me of a less crude George Carlin). He also uses it as a tool to spout out largely liberal ideas that could [annoy] even the most moderate Republican, then smooths it over by doing the same thing to the other side! Even when I was offended, though, I was laughing! :-)
Rating: 
Summary: Adolescent
Review: I am so disappointed with this book. Bryson comes off with an annoying and bitter adolescent attitude in this work. A week before I began reading The Lost Continent, I was lamenting about my nephew's 'blog. --The whole "oh gee, I'm soooo much hipper than everyone else and I think I'll make fun of everyone in my writing to prove it." I see little difference between Bryson's book and my nephew's adolescent rantings.
I don't have to have a happy ending or a happy book -- but Bryson is simply mean and shallow in his treatment of small town America.
Rating:
Summary: If you are searching for something positive - keep looking
Review: It is clear half way through this thing that the author hates, among so many other things, strip malls, fast food chains, cheap motels, tourist traps and old people. Yet he drives endlessly through America searching them out - on a good day, endlessly complaining and on a bad day - making fun of them. What starts out as a mission of discovery turns into a mission of ridicule. The beauty of America lies in its diversity. Yet if you if you were from another planet and read this travelogue first, you wouldn't even stop in for a cup of coffee. And that's really too bad.
Rating: 
Summary: Friendly Jibe at Small-Town America
Review: Under the guise of a travel book, The Lost Continent shows Americans' extraordinary pursuit of ignorance, false innocence, and the dumbing down that occurs when a society is caught in the thralls of rabid consumerism. In a cantankerous tone that would make Mencken proud, Bryson writes about his tongue-in-cheek quest for the mythical town of American innocence, "Amalgam," which he of course never finds. What he does find is a young, vast country full of bovine anti-intellectuals sedated by their own dream of innocence and sated by the bounty that comes so easily to them. Please bear in mind, though, that for the most part Bryson has a gentle touch and doesn't go overboard so that his jibes maintain a friendly manner. Here is a travel book that is done in the spirit of good fun and shouldn't be taken as an insult to small-town America.
Rating:
Summary: seriously hilarious
Review: bill bryson....is a combination of hilarity and scholarship... i put him down as one of my guests for a "fantasy dinner party"...and this book is one of the reasons why
Rating:
Summary: Utter Hilarity
Review: This is the book that introduced me to Bill Bryson, and I will forever be grateful to my old neighbor for lending me his copy.
As a person who, as a child, was trapped not once, but twice, in a cross-country trek with her family, I can relate to many of Bryson's experiences. His anecdotes concerning his childhood trips brought to mind the stories my own father would tell about his family vacations in the 1950s.
In "The Lost Continent," Bill Bryson holds up a mirror to America, showing both the good and the bad with a wonderful sense of humor. This is a book that reminds us not to take ourselves too seriously. Bryson doesn't get much credit for the amount of research he puts in his books; he drops informational tidbits as he pokes fun, and you learn while you laugh.
I've read his travel narratives about the UK and Europe, and neither have had the same impact on me as "The Lost Continent," simply because I know my country's foibles better. For those who love America, warts and all, this is the book for you.
Rating: 
Summary: A waste of talent
Review: The author clearly can be funny when he applies himself, but unfortunately he doesn't do much of that. Instead, he simply heaps abuse and condemnation on poor whites, the middle class, people with accents different than his, fat people, Southerners, and anyone else who commits the terrible offense of being less liberal, less educated, or less high-brow than he, or in any other way different. Reasons are seldom given; apparently, simply being different from Bryson is to be considered a grave moral offense. Thus, while the author does have some talent, I can't reccomend this for most people. If you're an insecure big-city liberal who desperately needs reassurance that you're better than all those grubby working-class small-town types, though, this should be right up your alley.
Rating: 
Summary: The American Way of Writing?
Review: Bill Bryson, living as an expatriate in London, returns to his roots in Des Moines and, borrowing his mother's Chevette, travels through 14,000 miles and thirty-eight states and looks at America. He did not really like what he saw in this often-entertaining and sometimes-annoying book. The Chevette was a pretty dreadful little car and perhaps it is not surprising that Bill Bryson seems to have travelled with his sarcasm gauge on full all the time. "The Lost Continent" is sub-titled "Travels in Small-Town America" but it should be "Travels Through Small-Town America" as the author does not get out of his car very much. He is on a Road Trip, which means driving endless numbing miles and meeting only those people essential to the Road Trip concept: waitresses, clerks in cheap motels and gas station attendants. He is looking for the one Perfect American Town, blended of all those virtues he imagines small towns in the United States enjoy and which he calls Amalgam. When he writes about his family and experiences growing up, Bill Bryson is very funny. There are parts of the book where you have to laugh out loud-the account of eating at the restaurant in Pennsylvania Dutch country where "I ate so much my armpits bulged"-and other parts that are less successful. Bill Bryson has an eye for funny detail but at the same time the reader has a feeling that he is patronizing of people who have not travelled, are poorly-educated or pronounce "Mississippi" the way people in Mississippi do. He badgers someone about why "Cairo" in Illinois is pronounced "Kay-ro," a question that probably nobody could answer and could be just as suitably asked of him and Des Moines. There are unattractive aspects of life in America, including gun-related violence, an apparently low level of general knowledge, a grim history of racism and a national spiral into obesity but the people populating this book are only there to reinforce Bill Bryson's prejudices about the crumminess of his home country. But it would have been nice to see his wit directed at television producers, evangelists and politicians and for him to have stayed longer in a town that just required to fill up the tank or sleep for a night. Cooperstown, for example, was a town he liked for the Baseball Hall of Fame, but he does not mention the scholarship program available for all the high-school graduates there or how the town has successfully kept out the chain hotels and fast food places that so blight America everywhere else. "Welcome to Des Moines. This is What Death is Like." is how he describes his hometown. Well, perhaps if you have never seen pictures of Grozny, the Chechen capital, or Kabul. And by the end of the book, Bill Bryson, the returning semi-Brit, is reconciled to his hometown again. Thrown together? Yes. Uneven? Yes. Quite funny in places? Absolutely.
Rating:
Summary: Hooked Me On Bryson
Review: I love this book. It was the first Bill Bryson book I ever read, and it's still my favorite (just barely squeaking by A Walk In The Woods). I have a love for the offbeat, and quite frankly, Bill's travels in the book are like my dream vacation. If it's kitschy, I want to see it. If it's famous, more so. Because of this book, I once travelled 2 hours by car while on a business trip to Michigan so I could visit the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village. If Bill hadn't written so lovingly about it, I might not have thought of it when I was on the trip. This is now MY favorite museum as well. Thanks Bill! Keep writing!
Rating:
Summary: Funny at times but it gets old
Review: I enjoyed Bryson's more recent books, so I went back to this one and found it rather tedious. This book would be a lot more enjoyable if Bryson wasn't so negative about everything. I wish I had a dollar for every time he said he was disappointed at some town or landmark he encountered. If I were him, I would have turned around and went home long before the end of the journey. One insight I gained though - he talks a lot about how his father was a grump during the annual family vacations. It's clear that Bryson is a chip off the old block.
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