Non capisco perché scrivere un libro in cui non fai altro che lamentarti di quanto sia brutta, monotona e dozzinale la Grande America. A parte qualche notevole nota ironica, un libro che non c’è motivo di leggere.. poco più che un itinerario stradale.

This was his first book and perhaps he hadn’t quite finessed the voice he used later. He works in a fair number of gratuitous slights that are a bit jarring without the balance of self-deprecating humour that he later developed. The worst I thought were against fat people, and women in particular.

But the reviewers characterizing this as negative or hostile to Middle America are just being way too thin-skinned and defensive. Bryson in fact goes overboard with delight at many of the places he encounters, while the shots he takes at the dreariest are more than justified.

He isn’t the most adventurous of travellers, simply passing through nondescript towns, visiting a lot of what you might call tourist traps, and sticking to what appear to be sealed backroads when he does venture off the interstates (at least, that’s my reading from following along on Google Street View).
But all in all, it is just a fun and enjoyable read.

I do like Bryson. I enjoy his wry views on life, people and places. He informs and he makes me laugh, and that's enough to ensure I keep coming back to spend more time in his company. Here he promises to follow the path of old holidays with his parents, when as a child he was hauled around the country visiting towns of dubious merit and passing time at ‘freebie’ attractions that failed to delight or even stay long in the memory. His father was a cheapskate who preferred to keep his dollar in his pocket. For all this, I sensed within the author a longing for times and places past. In fact, he states early on his desire to track down the perfect American town, devising a tick list drawn from memories of these early adventures and his own upbringing in Des Moines, Iowa.

In total, Bryson covers nearly 14000 miles and visits numerous states throughout the Union. On the whole he's pretty critical about what he sees and experiences, but I'm inclined to think that this is his style - I've seen it before when he's commentated on visits to different countries. For instance, he's lived in the U.K. for years and yet he is pretty unsparing in his reflections on his adopted nation too. And his cynical view on life in general does allow him free license to let rip an anything and everything he sees, often hilariously.

It’s a little disturbing that some of his vitriol is vent on parts of America I’ll be visiting in just a few weeks. My only hope is that as this book was penned some years ago things have improved significantly since. No matter, this is a deliciously funny account of his journey and I defy anyone to to read it or listen to it without a smile on their face. Well done Mr Bryson, I’ll be back for more of your thoughts and a adventures sometime soon.

Well, ain't it somethin for dat rascally Mr. Bryson wit all o dat funny Northern talk to make his way down here to Dixie and spend some time wid us! We sure do 'ppreciate you takin us into your rich and well-knowed book, Mr. Bryson. And yer gosh-darn-right, God save all those poor folk who done shopped at K-Mart! They should've spent their nickels at Crate & Barrel had they knowed what to do wid demselves.....

Audiobook narrated by William Roberts.


Subtitle: Travels in Small Town America

After living abroad for some years, Bryson returns to his home country eager to scratch his nostalgia itch for the road trips and experiences of his childhood. Setting out from his childhood home in his mother’s “aging Chevrolet Chevette,” he traverses the back roads of most of the contiguous forty-eight states in search of the perfect small American town, where “Bing Crosby is the priest, Jimmy Stewart is the mayor, and Fred MacMurray is the principal.”

The jacket promises “an uproariously funny narrative” but the book didn’t deliver … at least not in my opinion. I found much of it very dated (it was originally published in 1989), and his snide remarks about many of the places he visited were downright mean-spirited. In fairness, I also am dismayed by the commercialization and sameness of much of the landscape (I love driving vacations and have made many a trek across the USA), and I cringe at the ridiculous souvenir shops at even the most honored historic or natural sights. But I can ignore the shop selling commemorative pillows and mugs and still enjoy the majesty of Mammoth Cave, for example, or the historic information about Salem, Massachusetts.

I listened to this on audio, and William Roberts does a very good job of the narration. I wish he had better material to work with.

The most mean-spirited book I've ever read. How this could have ever been published, let alone reissued twelve years later, I don't understand. I may be done with Bill Bryson. I get he has name recognition in the nonfiction world, but there are a lot of other prolific writers out there who deserve to be more widely read who don't go on road trips for the express purpose of making fun of every person they meet when they sit down to write their book. This is utterly useless on top of being nasty.

Click here to hear me rant about this book over on my Booktube channel, abookolive.

Che bel libro, mi ha divertito tanto. È una guida stravagante ed emozionante non per il tipo di scrittura ma perché ti fa viaggiare insieme all'autore con le descrizioni dei luoghi. Ho scoperto posti che non avevo mai sentito prima e che pensavo fossero inesistenti.
Consiglio assolutamente di leggere questo libro selvaggio sempre con internet a portata di mano per scoprire in tempo reale quello che si legge.
Ineguagliabile.

I have been to many of the places in the west that he traveled to in this book and it was interesting to me to read about his experiences which were so different to what I experienced. We had a great breakfast in Sundance, WY and the waitress was so super nice and cheerful that I actually purchased a t-shirt to remember her. Bill Bryson did not get to eat there as The Shriners had taken over and the waitress would not help him. I don't find the west to be like his experience at all but overall I don't care for Wyoming especially if you travel it east to west. South to north is fine and Yellowstone in the early spring is wonderful before it gets too crowded. I thought Yosemite was beautiful but I did have to agree with him about how disorganized it is and would never go back there again for this reason. He uses too much bad language as usual and it annoyed me more in this book. His constant nasty comments about women also made me angry. (like he has room to talk!) One review mentioned him being like W.C. Fields and I thought that was accurate.
I have been over Phantom Canyon road several times into Victor and his comments were so funny to me! I guess I am used to wild places.

Nothing to write home about, not even if you are from small-town America. The author, in this book, is caught up in himself and his wit rather than the subject, the small towns of America.

Bill's first travel book, published in 1989, is very irreverent and very funny - some of the cultural references may be dated for younger readers, but as I am nearly same age as be is, not a problem for me. I still have some catching up to do on some of his other books!

He leído pocos libros de viajes, no son mis favoritos porque no tengo paciencia para seguir las descripciones. El caso de “The Lost Continent” (parece que no se ha traducido al castellano) es diferente. En él poco de lo que aparece es gratuito, todo está al servicio de la anécdota, y qué habilidad para contar anécdotas que interesen a cualquiera…
Pero además Bryson no se queda en lo superficial, sino que sabe extraer conclusiones válidas de lo que observa entre sus paisanos -como la violencia reinante en los Estados Unidos desde tiempos inmemoriales, por poner un ejemplo-.
Y sobre todo lo que hay que destacar de Bill Bryson es su enorme sentido del humor, que a menudo llega a resultar hilarante.

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.

So begins Bill Bryson’s book about returning to his childhood home after living in England for a decade. The above isn’t that much different from what many people would write about the place where they grew up and from which they left at the first opportunity.

But there’s more. He goes on to write that “[h]ardly anyone ever leaves. This is because Des Moines is the most powerful hypnotic known to man.” Okay. I can see how a young man, especially one who has traded Iowa for England, might have the same reaction to the place he left.

But he’s not through.

When I was growing up I used to think that the best thing about coming from Des Moines was that it meant you didn’t come from anywhere else in Iowa. By Iowa standards, Des Moines is a mecca of cosmopolitanism…. During the annual state high-school basketball tournament, when the hayseeds from out in the state would flood into the city for a week, we used to accost them downtown and snidely offer to show them how to ride an escalator or negotiate a revolving door.

And you know what; I was beginning to believe that the condescending little smart aleck probably did just that (smart aleck being a euphemism for another euphemism).

There’s more:

“Iowa women are almost sensationally overweight....”

I bet they loved reading this book in Iowa – especially the women.

However:

Above all, Iowans are friendly. You go into a strange diner in the South and everything goes quiet, and you realize all the other customers are looking at you as if they are sizing up the risk involved in murdering you for your wallet and leaving your body in a shallow grave somewhere out in the swamps.

I bet they loved reading this book in the South.

All of this is the beginning of Bryson’s first travel book which was published in 1989 when he was thirty-six years old, and still just as susceptible to boredom as he was as a child whining in the backseat of the car when the family took road trip vacations to places that he didn’t like. And the reason he didn’t like them was because he lacked the imagination that would have allowed him to see beyond the monotonous scenery of certain areas that could have made him appreciate the area’s history and uniqueness.

I know the above to be true because the same tendencies were apparent in the thirty-six year old man who wrote a book.

He spent a fall and a spring traveling in two huge loops— one in the east and one in the west – almost 14,000 miles, touching (barely in many cases) thirty-eight states -- and found most of those miles and those states to be boring. His idea of humor was to make fun at the expense of the people he encountered, rarely ever engaging them in conversation.

Here is the lengthiest conversation with a local that he recorded in the book:

I was headed for Cairo [Illinois], which is pronounced ‘Kay-ro.’ I don’t know why…. At Cairo I stopped for gas and in fact did ask the old guy who doddered out to fill my tank why they pronounced Cairo as they did.

‘Because that’s its name,’ he explained as if I were kind of stupid.

‘But the one in Egypt is pronounced ‘Ki-Ro.’

‘So, I’ve heard,’ agreed the man.

‘And most people, when they see the name, think ‘Ki-ro, don’t they?’

‘Not in Kay-ro they don’t,’ he said a little hotly.

There didn’t seem to be much to be gained by pursuing the point, so I let it rest there, and I still don’t know why the people call it “Kay-ro.” Nor do I know why any citizen of a free country would choose to live in such a dump, however you pronounce it.

The shame is that if Ian Frazier, the author of Great Plains, had wondered about the name and why people lived in such a town, he would have found out and he would have let the reader know. And so would have Rinker Buck, who traveled the Oregon Trail in a covered wagon from St. Joseph, Missouri all the way to Oregon, and wrote about it in The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey.

Much of Buck’s journey was along the Platte River in Nebraska, a state that Bryson barely nicked in the southeast corner of the state, proclaiming that “Nebraska must be the most unexciting of all the states.” It isn’t, but even if it was he didn’t know enough about the state to make that judgment.

This was my second reading of Bryson’s book. I remembered that when I read it in the early 90s that there was some humor that made me chuckle, but there was also much more that was so obnoxious that it made me cringe; a little of that went a long way. My reread doesn’t change that assessment.

What it did do was cause me to read Great Plains for the third time and The Oregon Trail for the first time. They sit side-by-side on my “favorites” shelf. I recommend them both.

As for Bryson, he mellowed somewhat in the many books that followed. I have no way of knowing, but perhaps he received some blowback about the harshness of the humor that he resorted to at other peoples' expense. I have read nearly everything that he later wrote down through the years and the humor is still prevalent, but it has lost some of the bitter edge that characterized this book. And that’s a good thing.