I was really excited to read this book, as I love observational memoir-style writing - especially when it deals with travel and cultural habits people keep with food. And at first I thought his observations were snarky, spot-on, and funny. But as the book wore on (like, about 25 pages or so in), I started to become appalled at how really shallow and mean he started to sound: everyone he encountered was disgusting, stupid, or fat - or all three - and the places he visited never measured up to the ideal he had envisioned. Perhaps his observations would ring true to someone who had just come here - if anything, he captures his disillusionment well. That said, however, his scopes of both exploration and expectation are ridiculously narrow. It all just got so tiresome; and while I performed a forced march to the end of the book, I can't say I felt enamoured with his writing or his perspective.

I read this many years ago. The whole book was very funny but I was especially beside myself with laughter when the waitress in Littleton, New Hampshire was taking his order at a small diner (pp.159-162).....and then when the "deranged" gas station attendant was pumping gas in his car, and what Bill Bryson was imagining could/would happen.

MISOGYNIST; (noun)
Someone, usually a man, who hates women or believes men are much better than
women.
See also: BRYSON,BILL

On seeing an out of state car on a highway:
“There’s always a fat woman asleep in the front passenger seat, her mouth hugely agape, and a quantity of children going crazy in the back. You and the father exchange dull but not unsympathetic looks….”

Reminiscing about a grade school crush :
“Sally Ann Summerfield is a blimp now. She turned up at my high school reunion two years ago and looked like a shipping hazard.”

On Caesar’s Palace staff :
“…all the cigarette girls and ladies who gave change were dressed in skimpy togas, even if they were old and overweight, which most of them were, so their thighs wobbled as they walked. It was like watching moving Jell-O.

And my personal favorite :
“In 1958 my grandmother got cancer of the colon and came to our house to die.
At this time my mother employed a cleaning lady named Mrs.Goodman, who didn’t have a whole lot upstairs but was possessed of a good Catholic heart. After my grandmother’s arrival…she told my mother she would have to quit because she didn’t want to catch cancer from my grandmother. My mother soothingly reassured Mrs. Goodman that you cannot ‘catch cancer’ and gave her a small pay increase to compensate for the extra work occasioned by my grand-mother’s clammy and simpering presence."

I think 1 star is a lot more fitting than ,“ so dazzlingly good” or “paradoxically touching” or even “…genuinely funny” -or any of the other incredibly ignorant, shameless back cover reviews that sell crap like this. This was Bryson’s 2nd book; he was in his mid 30’s and apparently trying to find his comic styling.

That is no excuse for this book.
He may have become more politically correct in his subsequent work, but the publishers should really have let this one die quietly instead of reprinting subsequent editions without serious editing.

In The Lost Continent, Bill Bryson chronicles his travel experiences on an American cross country road trip due in equal parts to nostalgia and to attempt to find small town life only seen on movie and TV screens. Bryson has been recommended to me for various reasons at various times, but I chose this one because I love a road trip. I've also completed a cross country road trip along with several partial country road trips. I thought maybe I'd relate better to this one than his other travel memoirs of trips of which I am unfamiliar. Maybe that was part of the problem, as my experiences 30 years later - published in 1989 - don't reflect his. I laughed out loud several times while reading this, but I feel guilty about it. Any woman described in this falls into 1 of 3 categories: 1. a relative (mother, grandmother, or wife), 2. disgustingly fat, or 3. a sex object. While driving through the South, he critically talks about growing up during the Civil Rights Movement, but then regularly says racist things. He doesn't like any place he visits, and disdains tourists of which he is one. Reading about his growing up in Iowa and reasons for the road trip are funny, but then realization hits that you're supposed to be laughing at racism, sexism, and his refusal to tip and it gets hard to finish. As I now realize this is his worst reviewed book, I might give him a second chance but I doubt it.

“I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to. When you come from Des Moines you either accept the fact without question and settle down with a local girl named Bobbi and get a job at the Firestone factory and live there forever and ever, or you spend your adolescence moaning at length about what a dump it is and how you can’t wait to get out, and then you settle down with a local girl named Bobbi and get a job at the Firestone factory and live there forever and ever…”
-tBill Bryson, The Lost Continent

Give me chance to explain.

I know that Bill Bryson is a hugely successful, internationally-bestselling author. I know his books are on the shelves of millions. Heck, even I own one, the entertaining, easily-digestible One Summer.

But The Lost Continent is not good. It is, in fact, an absolute bummer. I would not recommend it at any time, but especially not in these particular days of division, discord, and fear.

Part of my reaction, I see now, was shock. Shock that this super-popular writer could have produced something like this.

I stumbled across The Lost Continent quite by accident. It was on my wife’s personal bookshelf, which is to say, it was in a cardboard box under our bed, and I found it while looking for a shoe.

The premise – a thirty-eight state tour of America, purportedly focusing on small towns – seemed charming and sweet, a marvelous opportunity to hit the backroads and find beauty in simplicity. Sure, there’d probably be some light ribbing at the expense of rural folk, yet I was certain we’d ultimately end at a place of warmth and conciliation.

Well, turns out my assumptions were wrong.

This book is garbage. I hated it, with every fiber of my being. From the first page to the last. This is awful. It is spiteful, mean, heartless, uninspired, offensive, insulting, unfunny, uninterested, and dreary.

At its best, it is punching down. At its worst, it is close to hateful.

***

The Lost Continent is a book to take your mood, whatever it is, and drive it down, like a nail pounded into soft mud by a sledgehammer. In other words, not the best thing to be reading in 2020, while America falls apart. (In all honesty, this might have played a part in my reaction).

As noted above, Bryson has an incredibly lofty reputation. This was also his first book, so he was probably still working on his “voice.” But these pages – many of them filled with my furious annotations – feel like the work of an anti-intellectual knuckle-dragging mouth-breather.

The execution of The Lost Continent is cold, repetitive, and soul-wearying. Bryson goes to a place, spends five minutes there, declares it “boring,” and leaves in a cloud of gutter-level playground insults. He uses that descriptor – boring – so many times I stopped counting. Over and over again. It is the absolute height of obnoxiousness. My three-year-old says it’s boring, a lot. Bryson was thirty-six when he wrote this. I would never slap my kids. Bryson, on the other hand…never mind.

The only joke that works in The Lost Continent is a meta one. To wit: Bryson, despite all his sneering at the non-people he meets, comes off as the dumbest asshole in the realm. He adds nothing to any conversation. He does not make a single acute observation. He is a lackluster faux-adventurer who finds only one thing in each new place: a reason to despise it. Mostly, his reasons contradict themselves. The waitresses are either too friendly or not friendly enough. The hotels are either too small or too large. The small towns are either too dumpy or too perfect. In the midst of this mess of ill-considered thoughts, Bryson somehow avoids putting two ideas together, even by accident. There is not a single insight about America worth repeating.

***

I love road trips. Like, really, really love them. When I first got married, my wife and I blazed a path thousands of miles long through Missouri, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Kansas, and Oklahoma, sniffing out historic sites and accumulating rest-stop maps and collecting gas station sunglasses and having the best time of our lives. Every day we just woke up and drove, finding someplace new. Sometimes, when our four kids are simultaneously complaining about everything – in a Bryson-like manner – we think back to those days, when every road was an opportunity.

You almost can’t go wrong with a road trip.

With Bryson as your seatmate, though, I’d prefer Third-Class tickets on the Titanic. His gimmick is aging frat boy, a tired mélange of casual misogyny, occasional f-bombs, and an inability for self-reflection (the constant fat-shaming of women, for instance, is odd, since based on his cover photo, he's not exactly Brad Pitt from Thelma and Louise).

One has to question how, with the road before him, a map beside him, and all the time that he needed, Bryon went into this project with the mindset of a person on a death march.

***

I had fair warning, within the first few pages.

Things start off badly, and get worse. Bryson begins by claiming his birthright as a Midwesterner. Specifically, he is from Des Moines, Iowa. This opening gambit is a transparent pose. For some reason, people believe that claiming membership of a group gives them an open-season license to fire at will. Here, Bryson thinks he can be as “outrageous” as he wants, since he’s ostensibly just another small-towner, no different from the people he’s slagging.

But that’s not true. Bryson was born in Iowa, but he’s lived the majority of his life in London, and he wastes no time establishing his superiority and Anglophilia.

You see that in the way he talks about Des Moines, a description that is just at odds with reality. Yes, Des Moines is in Iowa. No, despite Bryson’s allegations, it is not comprised solely of overweight women at the Merle Hay Mall. Rather, it is the state capital of Iowa (with a cool capitol building), a college town (Drake University, founded in 1881), and host to a unique, internationally-known event (the Drake Relays). It is a modern city. But to hear Bryson describe it, everyone is still going potty in an outhouse, while looking upwards in abject horror whenever a flying machine passes overhead.

***

Bryson is clearly a brainy guy. Yet, oddly, The Lost Continent presents very little by way of factoids or trivia, in contrast to One Summer, which was constructed entirely of factoids. Here, though, Bryson is absolutely un-curious and unquestioning. Take the Merle Hay Mall. It’s not just a gathering place for the overweight. It’s named for Merle Hay, reputed to be the first American soldier killed in World War I. Why do I know that? Because I used to drive through Des Moines on a bimonthly basis. I saw the name, thought it was interesting, and I went home and looked it up. In all the thousands of miles that Bryson traveled, I don’t think he once wrote something down and said, I should look that up. In short: He. Does. Not. Care.

***

The Lost Continent is roughly divided into two parts: East and West. In both, the setup is the same. Bryson – who has been overseas for twenty years – hops in his mom’s Chevette and starts driving. It’s a simple, excellent idea, and it jumpstarted a long and lucrative career, in which he has morphed into a beloved literary figure.

That’s quite a turn, because The Lost Continent is mostly about Bryson badmouthing all that he surveys.

Unsurprisingly, Iowa gets slammed. Surprisingly, Bryson slams it by comparing it to the Sorrentine Coast, which is in Italy, and is also a place where the land meets the ocean. Is it really fair – no, strike that. Is it really coherent to compare a landlocked state to an ocean coast? No, it’s not. That doesn’t matter to Bryson, because he has only three tools in his toolbox: Fat Women Jokes; Corn Jokes; and Euro-elitism.

That’s not entirely accurate. He also finds time for some sub-Seinfeld riffs on the commercials he watches in his hotel room. You haven’t been introduced to Not-Funny until you’ve seen Bryson crack wise about Preparation H. Honestly, you’d be better off sniffing a ton of modeling glue, rather than exposing yourself to this.

The list of places that Bryson goes is long and merges together into one endless complaint. He doesn’t like Hannibal, Missouri, or Mark Twain’s home. He doesn’t like the Mississippi River (“dull”) or Gettysburg (“boring”) or the Smokey Mountains (beautiful, but too many fat tourists). Because he wants to spread his unamusing misanthropy as far as possible, he even goes to big cities – Las Vegas, New York City – so he can complain about them too.

Nothing can possibly please him.

The incident that really stands out is when Bryson goes to Yosemite National Park, one of the most beautiful places in the entire world. Of course, he concludes it is nothing but a massive disappointment. Why, you might ask? Because it is busy (that is, filled with tourists who are – you guessed it! – “fat”), and because he got lost.

Two quick points. The first: of course it’s busy, it’s Yosemite National Park, one of the most beautiful places in the world. It’s not some dank chippy in Lambeth where you can just sit all day by yourself in a dark corner, sipping Carling and despising everything.

The second: Bryson getting lost is his own stinking fault. I went to Yosemite with friends some years ago. Since it was packed (being one of the most beautiful, etc., etc.), we drove directly to the Ranger Station, and simply asked the Ranger where we could go to get away from the crowds. The Ranger answered our question, and we hiked for five days. With the exception of the day we went up Half Dome, we didn’t see another soul. The point, of course, is that Yosemite is massive. You can get lost in it – and not on the roads, like Bryson, but in the miles and miles and miles of backcountry paths. Bryson, though, goes to this place of incredible wonder and beauty, and is just disgusted, because there are others around him. Then he leaves and goes to a crappy hotel room to drink beer and watch television, like he does every night. If he had put forth the minutest effort, instead of whinging about every damn thing, he might have experienced something. That’s not his way, though. He prefers to take drive-by potshots at the world (which he clearly believes is meant for him alone), without ever getting out of his Chevette and interacting with his environment.

***

It is striking how few people Bryson actually speaks with in the course of 299 interminable pages. Unlike Tony Horwitz in Confederates in the Attic (which is how you do a travel-memoir), Bryson can’t engage in any meaningful interactions. This is not terribly shocking, since he comes off as a gaseous prick.

Nevertheless, it is worth mentioning, as it is symptomatic of Bryson’s extremely dark view of humanity. To him, the people in these small towns are not people at all. They are creatures. They are lower lifeforms without thoughts, dreams, loves, interests, ambitions. The way he writes about them is almost a literary cleansing, a condescension so vast and powerful that it denies men and women their basic humanity. The funny thing is, the joke is on Bryson. Published in 1989, we are now in the midst of a full-fledged culture war pitting urban Americans against rural Americans. The Lost Continent was not the cause, of course. But it was a harbinger. It turns out that a lot of Americans knew exactly what smug elites like Bryson were saying all along. It alienated them, and that alienation has turned to anger.

***

Somewhere along the line, Bryson must have changed. At the very least, his persona must have changed. I’m making this assumption because I get Bryson recommendations all the time. Almost everyone I know has A Walk in the Woods on their shelves. This includes people who would not be okay with the way that Bryson talks about poverty and poor people (including snide remarks to beggars about having “no dignity”) or the way he refers to Truman Capote as “a mincing little f-g.”

(Aside: Bryson’s views on poverty are both thoughtless, heartless, and fact-less. Indeed, there are times this feels like a high-school kid's unfortunate Twitter feed – the kind you eventually erase, hoping no one saw it – rather than the work of a middle-age man who should know better).

I have not looked into the matter, but I wonder if Bryson realized that childhood and nostalgia would work better – and sell more books – than this toxic stew. I wonder if he did the calculations and changed his style accordingly. If he did, only he can say if the change was more than skin deep.

***

To be fair – though I shouldn’t have to be fair; Bryson isn’t – the final third of The Lost Continent is more palatable. This covers the time heading west, rather than east, and he lightens up a bit, acknowledges some of his own shortcomings, and also manages a glimmer of…well, it’s not happiness, per se, but it’s a step above his usual griping. The final page is beautifully written, and if the book had used that tone – rather than being the exact opposite of that tone – this might have been a great book, rather than one of the worst I’ve ever encountered. It also would’ve helped if there had been more of Bryson’s dad, a figure who appears far too infrequently, and seems a much better traveling companion. Bryson’s dad was excited to go places, excited to meet people, excited to be on the road.

***

The final thing I have to say – I promise – is that travel is an incredible privilege. Aside from being extremely fun, it is also among the finest ways that exist in our universe to make connections and create empathy across the lines (national, cultural, racial, economic, religious) that separate us. It is an absolute shame that Bryson took this gift – this gift of opportunity, of time, of ability – to make his journey a parade of nastiness. In all his miles, he never found any common ground; he found only chasms. In all his miles, he never shared an awesome sight; he felt only bitterness that sights had to be shared. In all his miles, he never once seemed truly happy.

As a result, The Lost Continent is awfully sad, on top of everything else.

It's funny how so many Americans begin their reviews of 'The Lost Continent' with statements such as "I loved Bryson's other books but this one is terrible!", all because he treats America the same way as he treats everywhere and everyone else.

So while many Americans think it's acceptable - hilarious, even - for Bryson to make disparaging-but-witty comments about non-Americans and the places they call home, it is an utter outrage for him to be anything other than completely worshipful with regard to America and Americans.

The unavoidable, undeniable fact of the matter is that Bill Bryson's 'The Lost Continent' is not only one of his finest works, but one of the best books ever written by anyone in recent times about the USA and Americans.

It is as funny as anything you'll ever read, as well as being touching, poignant and fascinating. It is the first book I've read since 'Neither Here Nor There' (also by Bryson) that has caused me to think of calling my travel agent.

America has never been half as interesting as it is in 'The Lost Continent' and Americans ought to be supremely grateful it was written and published.

Five stars and highly recommended.

Bill Bryson was born in Iowa but, as he reminds you frequently, he moved to England and now he’s way better than you. I would like to have been present during his pitch for this book:

Bill Bryson: I went back to America in the early spring, when it was still cold and almost everything was closed. I borrowed my mother’s car and then drove all over the country acting like a twat. I insulted everyone I saw and complained nonstop, especially about the fact that it was cold and everything was closed and/or too expensive.

Here’s one of my witty observations, when I finally happened upon a tourist spot that was open, and I wasn’t too cheap to pay for it:

I don’t think I had ever been to a place quite so ugly, and it was jammed with tourists, almost all of them ugly also – fat people in noisy clothes with cameras dangling on their bellies. Why is it, I wondered idly, as I nosed the car through the throngs, that tourists are always fat and dress like morons?

And here’s a hilarious example of my musings on a woman I met in a café in Vermont:

…I listened to a fat young woman with a pair of ill-kempt children moaning in a loud voice about her financial problems to the woman behind the counter. ‘Harvey, he’s been at Fibberts for three years and he’s only just got his first raise.’ ...It didn’t sound as if God had blessed Harvey very much. Even his kids were ugly as sin. I was half tempted to give one of them a clout myself as I went out of the door. There was just something about his nasty little face that made you itch to smack him.

Right back at ya, Bill!

I hate-finished this terrible thing out of sheer morbid fascination, I really can't believe it got published. I read the kindle version, so I was able to do a count of the adjectives used most. And they perfectly sum up my feelings about this book:

Dull (18)
Boring (15)
Disappointing (19)
Flat (24)
Poor (17)
Empty (31)
Closed (30)
Ugly (9)

What's sad is, this author can be really funny. I laughed out loud quite a few times. But when it came to writing this review, I couldn't remember any of those things because the overall impression of his petty meanness was so strong.

4.25 Stars - Bryson in his usual, amusing & observationally cognitive-self!

There’s something humble about this novel, maybe it’s the whole ‘small-town’ thing but whilst BB remains as sharp as ever here, there definitely feels something is driving things to be a little under-stated in parts.

As usual, the characters are alive and feel ever-present, the terrain is feels like a constant and wise character in of itself... whilst we also get plenty of humour mixed with a low-level of skepticism that fades as things move along.

Bryson was a recommendation from a friend that I am just now getting to. He is also a writer born and raised in Des Moines, so figured he was worth looking into.

Interestingly, the copy I have is autographed and I bought it here in DM for $4. I get a feeling that Bryson would get some sort of peculiar appreciation of it. The concept of the book is that Bryson travels the country to relive some of those family vacations we all took when we packed everyone in to the car years ago.

I liked this book immensely. It is, as the back cover reviews claim, on the service cynical and sarcastic, but at its heart, nostalgic and appreciative (or as one reviewer said "like Steinbeck, if he traveled with David Letterman instead of Charly). My immediate thought was to recommend this book to everyone (although, maybe I am naive, Amazon gives it only an embarassing 3 stars) .

I got a lot of laughs out of it, and the fact that so much time is spent in Iowa and Carbondale, Illinois (places I know and have lived) got a special kick. It is likely that you will recognize some locations from the 38-state trip as well.

Ok, I'm still going to give this my highest recommendation, and hopefully next time I will be putting money directly into Bryson's pocket (although I still think the autograph is pretty cool).

I was excited to read this book. I've owned it for a few years now, and it's one of those books that I would see on my shelf and I'd think, this is going to be good, I better save it for another day when I guess I deserve to read something good rather than now when I should read something I'm not looking forward to. Or whatever it is that my thought process is about delaying gratification of books that I actually want to read versus a good deal of the books that I end up reading.

This should have been in the, why don't you just read this because then you can get it out of your apartment; or hey you have lots of really good unread books, Greg, so why don't you pick one of the mediocre ones that have been collecting dust and read that instead of something you might really like. Or maybe one of the, you are a worthless piece of shit, Greg, and you don't deserve to read anything good, so read this instead.

It was one of those books.

But I meant to like it.

I've only read one other Bill Bryson book, and I loved it. His history of American English, was wonderful. It was informative and witty and sprinkled with all kinds of nerd-tastic little facts and tidbits.

That's what I was expecting here. A witty and fun look filled with lots of interesting little facts about various small towns in America.

Instead it was a book about a guy a little younger than me, driving across country, spending most of his time in his car by himself and making some sort of funny and more not-funny at all remarks about America, and stopping at various tourist traps and historical sites where he inevitably grumbles about merchandising, any cost involved, and how bored he is by historical sites (so, um, don't go to them, it's a big fucking country)

Parts of the book are enjoyable, but too much of it is just snarky little comments that haven't aged too well in the twenty five years since the book was published.

I have no idea, but it came to me while I was making dinner and thinking about finally writing something about this book, is that the book must have originally been commissioned by an English publisher. Let's send the ex-pat, mid-western chubby guy back to his country with his affected English accent and let him give us some droll commentary on the big lumbering oaf of a country that was once one of our colonies.

I didn't think of that while reading the book, but it is the only explanation I can come up with for his Balkie-esque Perfect Strangers reaction to things like Friday the 13th and Mr. Ed. In the contemporary equivalent it would be like me summing up my evening by letting you know that Survivor was on TV, which is about doofuses on an island, but not something I would ever watch, but this country just loves doofuses on an island (does anyone watch this show still? I tried to watch an episode a couple of months ago and it confused me. Yet another sign that I'm getting dumber, like bordering on being mentally retarded dumb lately).

Too much social commentary about the 'current state of America' as seen from the eyes of someone who hasn't lived in the country for quite awhile, but most of it wasn't really that interesting, like it was sort of things that I was very well aware of at the time this book was written and I was about 14 at the time. Cineplexs were painfully small venues to see a movie in, the homogeneity of suburban sprawl was everywhere, historical battle sites weren't really that interesting (especially Gettysburg, which if you want to really have an unfun time go visit in the tail end of winter and walk twenty miles through bleak fields with a fairly unchanging landscape, while having strep throat, that makes the experience that much better, really), the people in horror movies are universally stupid and get killed because of their stupidity, radio sucks and plays the same songs over and over again. These are just a few of the things I'm remembering from the book.

As the book moves on it gets a little better. Maybe Bryson had some insights. He stops saying stupid shit like, I was driving from Butt Crack, Virginia, though Yokle-ville heading to I'm Gonna Bang my Sister Tonight, West Virginia when I ate a terrible meal at some dinner where good ol' boys were all hanging out. His quest to find the perfect small town seems to disappear, and he stops gripping about the deficiencies of so many places he stops in at not meeting up with his Mayberry ideal (or maybe it's just that the last part of the book is in the West, and you just don't expect that sort of thing there?). He starts to realize that it's outsiders like himself who want this idealized town, with it's quaint pragmatic shops, when the people who live in towns like having conveniences like supermarkets and fast food restaurants, and don't necessarily want to live in a petrified pretty past. Maybe they all just want that quaint little town to be somewhere else, a few towns over where they can go visit on a Sunday, but for the rest of the time they like being able to get stuff easily. Not that I'm saying all that stuff is good or that the convenience of a Wal-Mart, or a road covered in big box stores is good, but I can see how you would like to have those things near by (I come from a town that attempts to be picturesque, and there were (still are?) uproars when the real sprawl of Wal-Mart et al, started, back in the early 90's. I liked voicing my annoyance at these 'awful' stores, too. I liked bashing Barnes and Noble for destroying small bookstores, but you know what the small bookstore in my town was terrible. The small stores in the picturesque downtown were filled with shitty things that catered to an idealized idea of what you would find in a small downtown of a city/town trying to artificially hold on to the past while also kissing up to tourists and parents of college students up for a weekend. I can go and buy a pewter horse with no problem, but if I needed to buy something I actually could use the whole downtown was pretty much worthless, and it's not like that was a big change that came about after the big box stores came in (I originally typed big fox stores, what an awesome idea, giant stores that either sell foxes or are run by foxes, either way I'm totally on board with that idea)).

I didn't mean to start rambling on, but you know how it is. I guess what I mean to say is that I have mixed feelings about some of the homogeneity of suburban sprawl.

I don't even remember what I still meant to write.

I guess I'll wrap it up. Not very informative. The humor is kind of corny, immature and aged poorly. The idea of the trip is sort of weird. Drive for weeks at a time by yourself in a Chevette, while your wife and children are across the pond. I think if he had brought someone along with him the book would have been better. Or at least he'd have interactions with people who weren't mainly waitresses, motel clerks and gas station attendants. One reviewer, a friend of mine I think, said something like, it would have been nice if he actually talked to people in these small towns, instead of just talking to a waitress that might not be the sharpest tool in the shed and then declaring everyone dumb based on that one person. Ok, maybe I'm making up some of what this other person said, and exaggerating a little bit, but that is sort of the tone that much of this book takes.

I was expecting more.

Come ben sapete, di tanto in tanto mi concedo la lettura di un libro di viaggio, e dopo aver viaggiato assieme al Maestro Conan Doyle con Avventura nell'Artico. Sei mesi a bordo della baleniera Hope sono andato in giro per l'America con Bill Bryson. Più che un diario di viaggio, però, mi è sembrato un continuo commentare e ironizzare su usi e costumi di certi paesi e/o abitanti e/o suoi familiari e/o amici e/o conoscenti, ironia spesso non divertente. Peccato, qualche cosa di positivo la si trova in questo libro, come alcuni consigli su cosa visitare o dove andare per scovare dei monumenti o attrazioni da non perdere, per il resto sembra il diario di viaggio di un viaggiatore un po' arrabbiato col mondo e con le persone, forse l'autore l'ha scritto non in uno stato di grazia.

I genuinely guffawed out loud frequently while reading this book; Bryson's turns of phrase are viciously funny. But his ENDLESS complaining did get old, and nothing was ever good enough for him. He castigated the trashy things about America, but then when a town or experience was nice, it was "too nice" and felt fake: there was just no pleasing him. The section during which he's driving through the South is almost unreadable, not because of he pokes fun at Southerners, although he does do a bit of that, but because of his own abhorrently racist statements. It was so bad (joking about lynching??) that I almost quit reading, and I can't believe that this sort of thing could fly even in 1990. His jokes about women, fat people, poor people, and people of color were so far out of line that it was hard to believe this was the same person who wrote A Short History of Nearly Everything. I guess he improved with age, because dang, he was insufferable when he wrote this.