O poveste despre redescoperire prin retrăirea unei copilării care capătă noi înțelesuri și o nouă valoare. Evident scrisă in stilul unic (vioi și atât de amuzant) al lui Bill Bryson.
O carte foarte bună pe care o recomand și care trebuie citită până la capăt pentru a fi înțeleasă și apreciată cu adevărat.
PS: Evitați să vă faceți păreri despre carte pe baza sugestiilor celor care au scris opinii și recenzii negative. Aveți curiozitatea și răbdarea de a parcurge cartea și a îi descoperi singuri mesajul. Lectură plăcută!

A story of redescovery trough relieving a childhood that gets new meanings and a new value. Of course written in the unic style (very alive and so, so funny) of Bill Bryson.
A very good book that I strongly recommend and that has to be read until its last page to be truly appreciated and really understood.
PS: avoid taking for granted the advice of those who wrote bad reviews. Have the patience and curiosity to read the book and discover for yourself. Have a nice reading!

I had read a lot of Bill Bryson's books, but not this one from 1989. In this one, Bryson travels across America, mainly visiting small towns. It's a journey of rediscovery, as Bryson had been living in England. He wants to see how much the country has changed--and hasn't changed. He writes with a good deal of humor, but there is also a good deal of melancholy, as Bryson finds that he misses many of the things that have disappeared. Here's an example: (he has arrived in the town of St. George, Utah) "I went for a stroll...The drugstore was closed, but I was brought up short by the sight of a soda fountain inside, a real marble-topped soda fountain with twirly stools... I was crushed. This must be the last genuine drugstore soda fountain in America and the place was closed. I would have given whole dollars to go in and order a Green River or a chocolate soda..." I would have loved to do that too.

Bill Bryson will always be really, really, really fucking hilarious. When he's writing about boring suburbs and boring monuments, he's still super funny. When he's writing about walking through the woods for a good 1000-something miles, he's still super funny. That's pretty much why this book got 3 stars; I was laughing out loud almost continuously.

But why it was 3 stars and not 4? Because I think Bryson did a shitty job representing small-town America. He notices how ugly the suburbs are, how stupid the people are, how boring and over-priced the monuments are. But he doesn't actually talk to anyone from these places. Not in any meaningful way, at least. If your entire perception of why southern America is annoying and dumb is that a waitress talked to you with a drawl, then I think that's C-grade travel writing. He's hilarious, yes. Accurate? No. There's SO much culture in these areas. Louisiana? You don't think there's more to the people than a funny way of talking? The West? Colorado? Nevada? There aren't any gun-slinging cowboys out there with a good story to tell?

It's not enough to just tell me that the towns didn't have many restaurants to choose from -- because that's not really what these places are about. It's about the people. I think Bryson seriously missed out on what could've been an awesome and insightful book about the incredibly varied, inspiring, fascinating cultures that this country has to offer. Yes, making fun of how ignorant, untraveled, and ugly America is will always be easier/possibly way funnier. But it's a cop out.

oh bill...

While in the Frankfurt airport killing time, I decided I needed something to read while waiting in the airport and on the long flight back. During my vacation, I had already read Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of Freedom, Judith Butler's Excitable Speech, and Yves Simon's Freedom and Community, as well as most of two issues of CCC and an issue of Hypatia. I was a bit tired of academic voices and theory (though I had enjoyed everything I read, except perhaps Simon, whose Thomistic perspective irked me and whose writing seemed dry), so I went to the bookstore and perused. The English section was limited, so I was left trying to decide between a collection of short stories by Margaret Atwood and The Lost Continent by Bill Bryson.

Bryson, a native Iowan who had moved to Britain, had been haunting me for years. If someone was knowledgeable of travel writing, they asked me about him. I have some acquaintances who have been shocked that I hadn't read any of him. I was holding Atwood's book and Bryson's book, weighing the pros and cons of each. So I read Bryson first paragraph:

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 Bobbie 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.

and decided I had to read this. Iowa-deprecating humour? I was excited. Maybe this book would be worth the astronomical 14 Euros (which, with the exchange rate, is about 1 million dollars).

I admit I was chuckling a lot during his first few pages, and even occasionally throughout the rest of his book. However, it wasn't before too long that his book just began to annoy me. Every attempt at humor in his book, besides some self-deprecation or making fun of his family, is targeted shots at those who are different from him. Bryson's book seems like a good example of how to enact the construction of "normal." Overweight? Here's a few jokes thrown at you. An accent that isn't accepted as standard? He'll mock you incessantly. Differently abled and in the same room as Bryson? You're there for one purpose alone: to stare at because you're a freak.

I haven't quite finished the book, and I probably will (I only have about 50 pages left), but I have to say I'm greatly disappointed. The sour icing smothered the cake when he announced that, feeling incredibly visible and alone in a nearly all black Southern town, that he now knew what it was like to be black in South Dakota.

I beg your pardon, Mr. Bryson, but you have no idea what it's like to be black anywhere. If anything, Bryson's book is a chronicling of his extreme naiveté at his own unearned privilege.

It seems like the only group not worth mocking in his book are queer folk, and that's probably because they are so invisible to him that they're not even on the radar to mock. Jokes about other people can be amazingly funny, but a book constructed completely on mocking others, a book that seems to function mostly as a reinforcement of normalcy, fails to continue to be funny. It's just tiring.

I should have picked up Atwood's book instead.

Bill Bryson is an excellent writer; this book reads quickly; I enjoyed the process of reading it, the general narrative, and the humor therein.
That said, either Bill Bryson is a huge jerk and America is a great place, or America is awful and Bill Bryson is just a decent guy being honest. Seriously, the book runs something like this:

1) I don't like this town, it's all shoddy motels and neon signs and fast food. I want a quaint little town.
2) I don't like this quaint little town, all it does is use its quaintness to cater to tourists.
3) I don't like this quaint little town, all it is is a quaint little town that is friendly to tourists (but doesn't cater to them)--I want shoddy motels and neon signs and fast food!

Again, Bryson is an excellent writer--I definitely laughed out loud several times, but with a couple of minor exceptions (western Wyoming, a couple of small towns here and there) there is absolutely nothing that he likes in America. And while that's okay from time to time, after a hundred pages it starts to wear on you a bit, and by the end of the book you're sort of half hoping that he's set upon by hillbillies or angry ranchers or some such.

So, I guess I can recommend the book in terms of it being a good read, but with the warning that this book is rancorous without that necessary sense that there's good humor hidden under the surface that can make a cranky person enjoyable to be around.

This was far too mean spirited for me. Every person he talks about is is either fat, lazy, uneducated, a hillbilly...you get the idea. . It got old within the first 20 pages, and I gave up after 50.

Bryson does two things very well in this book, besides his trademark humour which is happily a constant in this and every other book he's ever written. He captures the spirit of the land at a very specific time in its recent history: 1987, the high water mark of the Reaganite project. Time and again, he is left demoralized by the mindless affluenza that was the hallmark of American society during the latter half of the 1980s.

More broadly, Bryson leaves a depressingly accurate description of the tawdriness and vulgarity of America's built environment - a cement desert of motels, burger joints, gas stations, strip malls, freeways and parking lots repeated ad nauseam throughout the Lower 48 - that is painfully recognizable even 25 years later. If you have ever wondered at the wanton debasement that has been visited on the land by its greedy natives, if you have ever been saddened by the pitiless ugliness that surrounds you in America's cities, towns and suburbs, then surely this book is for you.

Afterwards, read Edward Abbey and Philip Connors to cleanse your soul and to give thanks for the national parks and wildernesses that still do a stalwart job of protecting nature's beauty and grandeur against a hostile population.

PS This was Bryson's first book. The opening lines - "I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to." - must constitute one of the great introductions by any writer in contemporary literature.

n  I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to.n

Thus begins Bill Bryson his travelogue, setting the tone for what is going to follow: he is a smart-aleck, and he is going to be at his sarcastic best in taking down small-town America through which he is going to travel.

Des Moines in Iowa is a typical small town in America where nothing ever happens and nobody ever leaves, because that is the only life they have known and they are happy with it. But not so young Bill – he watched one TV show on Europe when he was ten and was consumed with a desire to become European. After a steady diet of National Geographics during his adolescence, Bryson left for England and settled there. However, during his middle age, he was filled with a sense of nostalgia for small-town America, and the journeys he had across them with his family as a child.

Bryson’s father was an inveterate traveller who compulsively took his family on vacations every year. These would have been extremely enjoyable except for two issues – Senior Mr. Bryson’s penchant for getting lost as well as his unbearable thrift (as Bill says, “[h]e was a child of the Depression and where capital outlays were involved he always wore the haunted look of a fugitive who has just heard blood hounds in the distance”) which made him avoid good restaurants and forced them to stay almost always in rundown motels.

But as happens to most of us, the onset of age made Bryson view these journeys more and more favourably through the rose-tinted glasses of fond memory; until one day he came back to the home of his youth and set across the country of his birth in an ageing Chevrolet Chevette. He made two sweeps in all, one circle to the East in autumn and another to the West in spring. His experiences during these two journeys are set forth in this hilarious and compulsively readable book.
---
If one is familiar with Bryson, one knows what to expect from his books – sarcastic humour, bordering on the cruel; enthralling snippets about history and geography; and really expressive descriptions of the places he visited. All these trademarks are in evidence here. By the time I finished this book, I found that I possessed a surprisingly large amount of information about America, what landmarks to visit, and what famous personalities lived where. Bryson writes with great feel and the place comes alive for you. His predilection for staying in small towns and seedy motels (the latter actually not by choice – many of the towns he ended up in the night did not have any other type of accommodation) shows up a facet of America the tourist is unlikely to see.

But it’s when he writes about people that Bryson gives free rein to his biting wit. The Illinois barmaid with ‘Ready for Sex’ written all over her face; the Mississippi policeman who asks “Hah doo lack Miss Hippy?” (“How do you like Mississippi?”); the Indian gentleman who would not stop questioning a hungover Bryson about the possibility of smoking inside a bus (who ultimately had to be shouted down); the geriatric pump attendant spraying petrol all over the place, with a burning cigarette butt stuck in his mouth... I can go on and on. Even though these people were used as the butts of jokes, I ended up loving them – they were so human.

And of course, one can’t forget Bryson’s signature comments about America.

n  The whole of the global economy is based on supplying the cravings of two per cent of the world's population. If Americans suddenly stopped indulging themselves, or ran out of closet space, the world would fall apart.
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When you grow up in America you are inculcated from the earliest age with the belief - no, the understanding - that America is the richest and most powerful nation on earth because God likes us best. It has the most perfect form of government, the most exciting sporting events, the tastiest food and amplest portions, the largest cars, the cheapest gasoline, the most abundant natural resources, the most productive farms, the most devastating nuclear arsenal and the friendliest, most decent and most patriotic folks on earth. Countries just don't come any better. So why anyone would want to live anywhere else is practically incomprehensible. In a foreigner it is puzzling; in a native it is seditious.n

And this hilarious quip about ONE PARTICULAR AMERICAN...

n  On Fifth Avenue I went into the Trump Tower, a new skyscraper. A guy named Donald Trump, a developer, is slowly taking over New York, building skyscrapers all over town with his name on them, so I went in and had a look around. The building had the most tasteless lobby I had ever seen - all brass and chrome and blotchy red and white marble that looked like the sort of thing that you would walk around if you saw it on the sidewalk. Here it was everywhere - on the floors, up the walls, on the ceiling. It was like being in somebody's stomach after he'd eaten pizza.n

One may ask, whether after the journey, was Bryson satisfied? Well, maybe not fully:

n  ...there are three things you just can’t do in life. You can’t beat the phone company, you can’t make a waiter see you until he’s ready to see you, and you can’t go home again.n

This is something which all of us must have felt one time or the other: the landscapes of our youth can be visited only through memory.

Huh. My dad liked Bryson's memoir, a friend liked his new one: At Home, and at work we sell lots of Short History. I like road trips, tourist traps and the rest so this seemed like a good place to start. Blurbs said it was funny. Don't think I laughed once. As it turns out, this was a fairly unwelcome journey on my part and I traveled it as begrudgingly as Bryson seems to have undertaken his trip. He's miserable the whole time...he hates tourist traps at some points, loves them at others, hates fast food and then can't wait to have some, he's searching for utopia by driving past everywhere as quickly as possible.
I felt like I was yelling at him as he sped past...hey, you missed something good! In both of my homestates, he didn't even try to see anything worthwhile. On a road trip to see America, he skipped nearly all of Route 66, but griped about the loss of it and the Lincoln Hwy. Everyone he saw was fat and stupid, though he only stopped anywhere long enough to speak to waitresses and hotel clerks and if he's as much of a joy as he seems to be, then I can't blame anyone for avoiding conversation and interaction with him. He traveled at times when things were closed, which allowed him to be just as disappointed at he wanted to be at nothing living up to expectations.
You get the idea. I get the idea that I picked the wrong book to introduce myslelf to this author, but won't be rushing out to try another one to remedy that impression. Too many other books on my list, and I deal with enough cranky people at work to want to deal with any others in my spare time.

A brilliantly funny and dry take on small town America. Bill Bryson is fantastic however some parts of this did get repetitive but I think that may have been the point!

"I mused for a few moments on the question of which was worse, to lead a life so boring that you are easily enchanted, or a life so full of stimulus that you are easily bored."

In September of 1987, shortly after the death of his father and having lived in England for ten years with his wife and children, Bill Bryson got into the small red Chevette borrowed from his mother and set out on a road trip to re-discover America, echoing the epic holiday road trips of his childhood. Bryson wrote up his impressions in a journal and this opinionated travelogue is the result.

13,978 miles through thirty-eight states over two separate trips, one in the autumn and one in the spring, make up the sum of his excursions. Small towns are the focus, as Bryson searches for the fantasy backdrop of the Hollywood movies of his childhood. He is rather predictably regularly disappointed, and vents his chagrin freely. There are plenty of good experiences, too, but these rather pale into insignificance when seen alongside his constant complaints. The book does however, end on an positive note because although Bryson fails to find his utopia he does admit that there are indeed places in America where life is good.

I found this an interesting book, it reveals as much about about the author as it does his native land, a few parts made me smile but in the end these failed to outweigh his constant carping. At times it got rather repetitive and ultimately the book failed to really grip me but then I have also never done a road trip around America so maybe the failing is mine.