A Walk in the Woods : Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail

Rating:
Summary: WHAT A MIDLIFE CRISIS!
Review: The same week I was reading in article on the Appalachian Trail in the Travel section of the newspaper was the same week I ran along this book in the "New Release" section of the library. As I read the sleeve and found out the author was a fellow Iowan now living in New Hampshire, I was hooked.

This book is just what it says it is--literally and figuratively: A "Rediscovering of America" while walking the Appalachian Trail. Of course it is also a brief historical overview of the history of the trail itself. In fact it's those portions of the book where Mr. Bryson offers us a glipse into the little historical idiosyncracies and absurdities of stops along the Trail that I found more interesting than the hiking itself. The history of America and the melting-pot she is is almost a study in the absurd. Bryson exploits these and makes us laugh along the way.

There are critics to this book, of course. Mamby-pamby purists who want this book to be something it is not. Many of them will follow my own review on this site. Read them and you'll see what I am talking about. This books was not meant to be study of the Appalachian Trail. Nor was it some sort of guide to hiking the Trail. It's simply an entertaining observation from someone who could have had a whole lot worse mid-life crisis. I am skeptical myself of the character Katz. I am from Iowa and many of the things he discribed about his hiking partner could have been contrived, but somehow I doubt it. It's certainly possible. Journeys like this (thinking of "Huck Finn" and "On the Road") need their "Id" characters. Perhaps Katz is merely the subconsience of Bryson--the inner-person he is struggling to suppress inside his middle-age body. Certainly Katz fits that description, but somehow I think that a character contrived like that would be inappropriate to this story. But I don't know, I am an amateur at this analysis stuff.

In any case, this book is thoroughly entertaining and will certainly have you laughing out loud at his quips towards the variety of people that hike and work on this trail, as well as just the folks he runs into along the way (from the guy that sells him the hiking equipment at the beginning, to the guy who drives 90 mph in a pickup as Katz and Bryson ride in the back to the town at the end). Read it for entertainment and for a few laughs. But like any joke, there is always the nugget of truth inside the punch-line that makes it funny. No doubt you will notice them. The critics didn't.

Rating:
Summary: Bryson is hilarious, esp. in his own voice
Review: I started out listening to Bill Bryson thru a CommonWealth Club appearance he made soon after writing 'A walk in the woods' and that particular 1-hour speaking engagement is an excellent introduction to Bryson and his writing. (You can find that CommonWealth Club presentation and all of Bryson's books as audiobooks at Audible.com - just follow the "Audio Download" link in Amazon's description of any Bryson book).

Don't buy the book when you can get the audio download for so [much lessmoney].

Beware! If you listen to 1 hour of Bryson, you may end up listening to all the rest of his books, all read by the author. I imagine Bryson is funny enough on the printed page, but in his own voice, he is simply hilarious.

A bit of advice: don't listen to more than one Bryson book per month, as they do tend to get a bit repetitive. Bryson sees humor and irony in everything he writes about, and he's unyieldingly upbeat. Sometimes it sounds like every thought of his is like this: "I walked into this cafe that WAS LIKE NO OTHER ON EARTH, and I WAS IN LOVE - the sky was SO BLUE and the water was SO TRANSPARENT, and the coffee's aroma was SO (well) AROMATIC."

Rating:
Summary: An insult to the AT and all the people who love it
Review: When I first sifted through this in the bookstore I wondered about Bryson's continuing bear obsession, given that he doesn't see one. Now that I've finished it I realized it's the funniest part of the book. The bear is really Bryson's own repressed conscience, reproaching him for what he did.

I strongly recommend that all the people who loved this book here purchase and read Jean Deeds' "There Are Mountains to Climb" before ridiculing us "purists."

She didn't finish the trail either, but she can truly claim to have tried, and you kind of wish Bryson or Katz had been the one to break their leg stumbling down a mountainside. She's Gallant to their Goofus, preparing properly (One word, Bill: maildrop).

And there is something in that book you won't find here: humility. I haven't hiked much of the AT, but I've done some maintenance work on it here in NY's Hudson Valley and may try the whole trail some day. All the thruhikers I've met are like Deeds and unlike Bryson by the time they get up here: whatever their lives off the trail, they have achieved what even Bryson calls "a low-level ecstasy" (Passages like that one are what's especially frustrating about this book, as you can glimpse what might have been and realize that Bryson knows it too. Perhaps his publisher should have made him finish the trail or canceled the contract). They realize that what they have accomplished, mighty though it is, is still nothing compared to what they have passed through (yes, even Pennsylvania). You won't find any of that here. Deeds may not make you laugh out loud on the bus, but that's because she has a wider perspective and realizes that not everything is meant to be fodder for a blazing irreverent wit (and that is genuinely hilarious, but by the end of the book, it has become as distracting as a cloud of blackflies). Deeds actually comes across as a human being and not a slumming writer, so you feel sorry for her injury in Maine, a few hundred miles from Katahdin, after she'd come so far.

So is it just us hard-core hikers who resent the way the AT is portrayed? I have a friend who section-hikes down south, and he reports that Bryson has made enemies up and down the Trail with his depictions of certain campgrounds and the people there. Some people wanted to sue him for defamation. (Go way down in these reviews, and you'll see that "Bryson" has entered the thru-hiker argot as a verb meaning "to make a really stupid error")

I also found the other reviews noting certain factual errors and discrepancies to be interesting. "Mother Tongue" has a number of howlers regarding the history of the English language, and it wouldn't surprise me that Bryson has at best a casual commitment to telling his readers the truth. (I especially like where he correctly refers to Clingmans Dome as the highest peak on the trail, then later says Mt. Washington is the highest peak east of the Rockies. They can't both be right ... does he even have an editor?)

But I learned the kicker from a 2000 thruhiker who gave a slide show near me: KATZ DOES NOT REALLY EXIST. The owner of the campground where Bryson complains about being holed up for several days because of heavy snow in the GA/NC line area (which he seems to resent because it shouldn't snow in the south), recalls Bryson (after she finishes screaming about him) coming in ALONE at the time described. She said she would have remembered a foul-tempered fat guy, and there wasn't any.

Since "Katz" is such a major part of the book's joy (and I admit, he is funny) for those who love it, I leave it to you to draw the proper conclusion from the above regarding Bryson and his real motives for writing this book.

Rating:
Summary: Mr. Bryson just does not know the Appalachian Trail
Review: This is written from the perspective of a person who has hiked 2,000 miles of the Appalachian Trail and will complete the journey during the summer of 2001. It is also from the perspective of someone who has spent many volunteer hours maintaining the Trail.

I, like I imagine thousands of others, laughed hysterically for the first 39 pages. Then I abruptly stopped when Mr. Bryson described how his friend Katz dumped pepperoni, rice, cans of spam, and brown sugar over a cliff as he climbed Amicalola Falls. On page 41 and 42 he amends this list by adding coffee filters which "...were great for throwing. Fluttered all over". Don't forget the cheese and peanuts (no doubt still in their wrappers) that went along with everything else. They must have made a nice resounding thud in the quiet of the forest. Evidently, neither Katz nor Bryson gained a greater appreciation for the environment because the dumping continued. On page 86, Katz flung his cream soda can into the underbrush. (Which one of us picked that one up?) Our beautiful trail in Maine was not even sacred to Katz's lack of environmental ethic. On page 239 and 240, he goes at it again - this time getting rid of clothing, water bottles, and food. I suggest that Mr. Bryson may want to atone for the damage that he has done by contacting any trail club and volunteering a few days. He may find that picking up after poorly prepared slobs really isn't that hilarious after all.

Let's continue, I'm just getting warmed up! Trail maps. Perhaps Mr. Bryson is ignorant of the fact that most of the work on trail maps is volunteer. He also must be ignorant of the fact that, while he was writing and publishing his book for cash, Keystone Trails Association volunteers (yes, the Keystone Trails Association that was referred to on page 174) were hard at work replacing the old black and white maps with incredibly beautiful and detailed color maps. Did the volunteers make money for this? Nope! Not even enough to pay for Katz's can of cream soda that they had to pick up under the bushes! Perhaps since Mr. Bryson feels that the AT maps are so poor he would care to donate some of the proceeds of his book to help update all of the maps. One tenth of the sale of his book would go a long way.

What enflames me is that instead of praising KTA, an organization filled with dedicated people who have spent thousands - hundreds of thousands - of hours building, signing, and maintaining PA hiking trails, Mr. Bryson criticizes them. But praise doesn't sell a book. And praise doesn't make a person rich.

On page 189, Mr. Bryson admits that he only walked 11 miles in Pennsylvania, yet on page 173 he describes how lousy the AT is in PA. Oh, Mr. Bryson, the 11 miles you walked must not have included Pole Steeple nor the outstanding views of the Susquehanna River from Hawk Rock and Peter's Mountain. Those 11 miles could not have been on the crest of Peter's Mountain with its frequent pastoral views. You must have by-passed the Pinnacle, Pulpit Rock, the Bake Oven, and the lovely rhododendrons, mountain laurels and hemlocks. It's sad that you missed all this. You missed Pennsylvania. But you did spend 5 pages describing Centralia. What does Centralia have to do with the AT? It's an hours drive, and a four days hike, away! But since you only hiked 11 miles in PA, I guess you had to write about something!

All this was bad enough, but on page 199 I gave up. Mr. Bryson states, "...the ATC seems to be positively phobic about human contact. Personally, I would have been pleased to be walking through hamlets and past farms rather than through some silent protected corridor". And on page 200 he states, "...the AT might be more interesting and rewarding if it wasn't all wilderness, if from time to time it purposely took you past grazing cows and tilled fields". He also suggests that some riverside walking would be nice. What's wrong with this picture? For starters, Mr. Bryson didn't bother to hike the AT. For if he had, he would have known that the AT is all these things. He would have hiked through the trail towns of Hot Springs, Damascus, Pearisburg, Harper's Ferry, Boiling Springs, Duncannon, Port Clinton, Delaware Water Gap, Kent, Dalton, and Williamstown to mention a few. He would have met some of the wonderful people who live there and go out of their way to befriend the hikers (unless, of course, they are made fun in the way Mr. Bryson made fun of the Southerners). He just might have had to run from frisky calves and horses in fields through which the AT passes. He obviously entirely missed the 17 mile stretch of the AT through the pastures of the Cumberland Valley and the meadows of wild flowers in Virginia and Massachusetts. And he didn't walk along the lovely Housatonic River and spend a couple of hours in the gloriously warm sunshine on the rocks at Bull's bridge.

In closing: There are those of us who hike the AT.

There are those of us who hike the AT and write lovely, meaningful, and accurate books about it.

And there are those of us who don't bother hiking the AT, but, what the heck, they write about it anyway.

We know the difference!

A final word to the hiking community. If you want to read this book, borrow it from someone who unknowingly bought it. Please, don't pay Mr. Bryson to pick up his garbage!

Rating:
Summary: It would have been better as a short story
Review: I am very happy that I checked this book out from the library instead of buying it because it is really only half a book.

The book starts out well, but it takes a bad turn when they quit hiking the trail. The book should have ended there, but instead drags on and on. I stopped reading when Bill begins to drive back to the trail for day hikes, so if the book gets better after that, I will never know.

Rating:
Summary: Funny and heartwarming...
Review: What a hoot! Bill Bryson's account of his attempt to walk the Appalachian Trail is quite endearing to me, a 41-year-old out-of-shape wishful hiker. You will laugh out loud at some parts. Bryson has an amusing take on the people he meets along the way, and his sometime sidekick Katz. I appreciated his descriptions of the wonders of the Eastern woods which I will never see, because Bryson has convinced me that the Appalachian Trail is beyond my abilities, although it will not stop me from attempting the trails in my own home state of California. I came across an advance reading copy of the book, so I don't know how it compares to the end product, but the situation near the closing of the book nearly had me in tears over concern for Katz. This is a wonderful, funny, informative book. Please read this book!

Rating:
Summary: Thoroughly Enjoyable
Review: Okay, I've read the criticisms of purists who claim that Bryson had no call to write this book because he didn't hike every mile of the appalachian trail. So what? As Bryson said, few people have achieved that. Like me, for example. I've done many day trips and a couple of overnights (including 10 days on Outward Bound)on various parts of the trail, so I wasn't looking for another I Climbed Mount Everest type book, but someone who could enrich my own experience on the at. And while Bryson was more ambitious than I've ever been, I could identify with that as well, having entertained the thought of making such a trek. Anyway, I found the book to be a pleasant pastiche of anecdotes about the various types of people one encounters on the trail, commentary about the the history of the trail as well as its design and upkeep, musings about its flora and fauna (especially appreciated his high dudgeon when talking about what's extinct or endangered), surreal descriptions of, e.g., a Pennsylvania town that sits atop a smoldering anthracite mine, or what its like to experience death by hypothermia (reminiscent of the description of drowning in A Perfect Storm). And Bryson's relationship with fellow traveler, Katz, provided an added comic element (and a necessary one, in my opinion, as the book became overly pedantic when Bryson hit the trail without Katz, returning to a more lighthearted tone when the two were reunited for the last leg of Bryson's adventure). Best thing about reading this was learning that whenever I'm in the mood for a lighthearted travel essay (with enough gravitas sprinkled in to give it some redeeming value), I can always dip into Bryson's growing body of work.

Rating:
Summary: Casually looking title, you are hard-put to figure out...
Review: ...how it could possibly be "a runaway best seller."

No less than thirty-three sage reviewers (thirty-six if you count the three reviews no the cover) heap praise and commendation on Bill Bryson's story of his 870 mile trek over the Appalachian Trail (the trail is actually 2,200 miles long). All this, mind you, carrying a forty-pound pack. (Have you hoisted a forty-pound pack lately, let alone try to walk with it?) And all earthly needs, on such a walk, must come from this pack on your back. I daresay few of us have the strength or fortitude to carry out this kind of venture, particularly, as Bryson did, in part, with snow on the ground.

In 1996 that's what Bryson and his friend Stephen Katz did and Bryson made it into a 274-page story that is "choke on your coffee funny" as one reviewer put it. For example: "I wanted to get back on the trail, to knock off some miles. It is what we did. Besides, I was bored to the point somewhat beyond being bored out of my mind. I was reading restaurant place mats, then turning them over to see if there was anything on the back. At the lumberyard, I talked to workmen through the fence. Late on the third afternoon, I stood in a Burger King and studied, with absorption, the photographs of the manager and his executive crew (reflecting on the curious fact that people who go into hamburger management always look as if their mother slept with Goofy), then slid one place to the right to examine the Employee of the Month awards. I then realized I had to get out of Franklin."

Not only is Mr. Bryson's tale excruciatingly funny, he is an astute observer who lays out powerful insights on how modern mankind is wantonly destroying nature at an alarming pace. He captivates you with penetrating wit, yet at the same time, makes it crystal clear that if we keep tearing nature down at our present frantic pace, there soon won't be any nature with the result that, indeed, there may not be any of "us."

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant
Review: I loved this book, it was the first Bill Bryson book I had ever read, and now I must have read it about 20 times and i also have all his other books.

This is a funny and brilliant story, and is guaranteed to bring tears of laughter to your eyes. It is a perfect blend of comedy and fact, and Katz (Bryson's travelling companion), is also very funny and complements Bryson fantastically.

It is basically the story of Bryson hiking the trail, but the way he continually makes fun of himself and Katz is what keeps the story going.

Read it!! An excellent book

Rating:
Summary: A Minority Opinion!
Review: By now, most potential readers know the story. Two middle-aged guys, one of them (Katz!)completely out of shape in mind and body, decide to hike the Appalachian trail, from Georgia to Maine. The reader was suspect of the venture from the start, perhaps made so by the author's photo on the cover. This is no athelete. Full disclosure! They don't make it! They quit in Gatlinburg, TN. The author proceeds to make a series of negative comments about the area, which from this reader's personal experience are inappropriate, inaccurate and unfair.They try hiking the AT in sections, quitting again in VA, but only after Bryson takes several outrageous swipes at Confederate General Stonewall Jackson. The author is no Civil War historian (ie: Jackson and Robert E. Lee were in the Union Army at the time of the Harpers Ferry raid). The author sweeps dismissively through PA (it's a coal slag, you know), and skips NJ, NY and CT entirely. Bryson emerges in his native New England with smaller walks. Then the pathetic Katz resurfaces. They try to hike the Northern end of the AT in Maine, but surprise (!) they quit again. End of story. I suspect strongly that Bryson backwardsly decided to write a book and then to hike the AT. Since he didn' make it, he had to use filler-lots of it. The result is a story that is satisfying in part but ultimately lacking. It would have been better if Bryson had completed a whole section of the AT, which he may have with the right partner, and stuck to writing about the outdoors. In so doing, he would have spared the good folks of Gatlinburg his "humor" and let Stonewall Jackson lay beneath the trees in peace.