The Lost Continent - Bill Bryson

   1989; 299 pages.  Full Title: The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America.  New Author? : No.  Genres : Travel Memoir; Americana; Anecdotal Humor; Non-Fiction.  Overall Rating: 8½*/10.

 

    A little bit about the author, Bill Bryson, mostly courtesy of Wikipedia.

 

    He was born in 1957 in Des Moines, Iowa, and grew up there.  In 1973 he visited Britain, then opted to stay there.  He married, moved back to Iowa in 1973 to get his college degree, then moved again to Britain in 1977.

 

    His father, Bill Bryson Sr., died in 1986.  Shortly thereafter, Bill Jr. journeyed back to the US and made two long sightseeing trips, mostly by car, to the less touristy places in America.  The first one was in the fall of 1987; the second in the spring of 1988.

 

    This book chronicles those journeys, blending in a healthy dose of memories about his dad, along with the author’s trademark style of wry humor.

 

    Wikipedia notes that The Lost Continent was Bryson’s first travel book.

 

What’s To Like...

    Bill Bryson divides up the two legs of his odyssey into 28 chapters.  The first trip is to the East, and takes 34 days, 6,842 miles, and 19 chapters.  The second phase covers 7,136 miles (total: 13,978 miles) but only 9 chapters; Bryson discovers that things are farther apart in the West.  By the end, he’s traveled through 38 of the 48 contiguous United States.

 

    For the most part, he adheres to the subtitle’s goal of visiting small towns, but he occasionally hits the large cities as well, including Washington D.C., Philadelphia, New York City, and Las Vegas, where his slot machine luck was spookily similar to mine the one and only time I played the slots there.

 

    There’s no Table of Contents in my paperback version, but there is a 13-page Index in the back which lists, among other things, all the small towns mentioned in the book.  In addition to the author’s personal impressions of each stop, the text is full of fascinating touristy and historical tidbits concerning those places.

 

    It was fun to compare my experiences with Bryson’s in places we’ve both been to.  He bemoans Boston’s freeway system; I almost had a head-on collision doing that once.  He was wowed by the colonial attire in Williamsburg, Virginia; so was I.  He cringed while driving through the ghetto area of Philadelphia; I did likewise.  He had a blast in Jackson Hole, Wyoming and Yellowstone National Park; so did I.

 

    The book is a trivia lovers delight.  You’ll learn the proper way to pronounce “Cairo”, the city in Illinois, not Egypt.  The Melungeons in Appalachia will mystify you.  You’ll visit Mark Twain’s home in Hannibal, Missouri, and nearly plummet to your death off a “scenic road” in Colorado.  You’ll delight in eating at a genuine Pennsylvania Dutch restaurant, although Bryson doesn’t give its location. (Hey, I was born and raised in that part of the country.)  And that's just a small percentage of Americana highlights you'll read about in The Lost Continent.

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Apposite (adj.) : apt in the circumstances, or in relation to something.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4.0*/5, based on 5,152 ratings and 879 reviews.

    Goodreads: 3.81*/5, based on 63,169 ratings and 3,597 reviews.

 

Excerpts...

    The most splendid thing about the Amish is the names they give their towns.  Everywhere else in America towns are named after either the first white person to get there or the last Indian to leave.  But the Amish obviously gave the matter of town names some thought and graced their communities with intriguing, not to say provocative, appellations: Blue Ball, Bird in Hand, and Intercourse, to name but three.  Intercourse makes a good living by attracting passersby such as me who think it is the height of hilarity to send their friends and colleagues postcards with an Intercourse postmark and some droll sentiment scribbled on the back.  (pg. 135)

 

    People in the West like to shoot things.  When they first got to the West they shot buffalo.  (. . .)

    Many people will tell you that you mustn’t call them buffalo, that they are really bison.  Buffalo, these people will tell you, actually live in China or some other distant country and are a different breed of animal altogether.  These are the same people who tell you that you must call geraniums pelargoniums.  Ignore them.  (pg. 214)

 

“Hah doo lack Miss Hippy?”  (pg. 58)

    The profanity level in The Lost Continent is higher than what you’d expect in a travelogue, although I wouldn’t call it excessive.  There were eleven instances in the first 20% of the book, including a couple of f-bombs.  I don’t recall any “adult situations”, although some of the author’s comments on female physiques might be viewed as misogynistic by today’s standards.

 

    Some reviewers were turned off by Bill Bryson’s negative and/or snarky opinions of a portion of the little towns he visited.  They have a point, but I imagine it’s difficult not to become a bit jaded if you drive to, and walk through, dozens upon dozens of tourist traps like Bryson does.  After a while, all of the gift shops look the same.

 

    Other reviewers weren’t thrilled with Bryson’s writing style, which is folksy and often goes off on irrelevant tangents.  Again, they have a point, but this is an early Bryson effort.  It's the ninth book of his I’ve read, and I can say that with time, his technique becomes more refined, without losing its edginess we devoted readers all expect and look forward to.

 

    All in all, I enjoyed The Lost Continent, especially since it brought back childhood memories of family vacations where we rode around in station wagons, slept in tents, and cooked our own meals.  We got our cheap thrills by doing things like feeding the black bears on the roads in the Great Smoky Mountains and walking around on the Gettysburg battlefield, two places that Bill Bryson also visited.  Those were good times.

 

    8½ Stars.  One last thing.  In walking through the touristy area of Gatlinburg, Tennessee, Bryson comes across a shop called the “Irlene Mandrell Hall of Stars Museum and Shopping Mall”.  Now there’s a name that I haven’t heard in a long while.

The Mother Tongue - Bill Bryson

   1990; 245 pages.  Full Title: The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way.  New Author? : No.  Genres : Linguistics; Reference; English Language - History; Non-Fiction.  Overall Rating : 10*/10.

 

   When you get right down to it, English is a poor choice for a global language.  Oh, there are worse ones, such as Mandarin Chinese which has thousands upon thousands of ideographs that you pretty much have to just memorize.  Or Basque, which has almost no words in common with any other tongue.

 

    There’s also well-intended things like Esperanto, foremost amongst about a half dozen artificial languages that were created with the intent of convincing the whole world (literally) to use them as a global tongue.  The problem is that they have zero native speakers, so you’re basically asking every person on Earth to learn a second language.

 

    So maybe English is not such a bad choice, despite the British and the Americans having different words for the same thing, different ways to spell words we have in common, different accents, and a different set of idioms to contend with, including the unfathomable Cockney rhyming.

 

    Perhaps it would behoove us to study up on the English language: learn its history, its subtleties, its variances, and its abundant inconsistencies.

 

    In other words, let’s read Bill Bryson’s fantastic book, The Mother Tongue.

 

What’s To Like...

    The Mother Tongue is divided into 16 chapters, namely:

01. The World’s Language

    An overview.  English’s strengths and weaknesses.

02. The Dawn of Language

    Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons.  Pidgins and Creoles.

03. Global Language

    Various “Endangered” Languages.

04. The First Thousand Years

    From 450 AD to Shakespeare.

05. Where Words Come From

    Five different ways that words come into being.

06. Pronunciation

    It changes over time.

07. Varieties of English

    Dialects.

08. Spelling

    Weird spellings in English.  Spelling reform movements.

09. Good English and Bad

    How “proper” grammar is constantly changing.

10. Order Out of Chaos

    The history of dictionaries.

11. Old World, New World

    American vs. British English.  Cross-pollination.

12. English as a World Language

    Global mangling of English.  Esperanto.

13. Names

    Nobles, Streets, Pubs, Surnames, and Places.

14. Swearing

    Including euphemisms and etymology.

15. Wordplay

    Crossword puzzles, and other linguistic pastimes.

16. The Future of English

    Featuring the “English only” movement.

 

    I usually mark my favorite chapters in pink, but here, I loved them all.  Chapters 1-7 are the history of the English language, Chapters 8-10 focus on how grammar evolved, and Chapters 11-16 are an assortment of “fun” linguistic aspects of English.

 

    I was raised in Pennsylvania Dutch country, so I loved seeing that dialect getting some ink, ditto for the nearby town named “Intercourse”.  The section on the Basque language also resonated with me, since I read a Mark Kurlansky book about them earlier this year.  The review is here.

 

    The book is chock full of trivia and obscure facts.  The oldest sentence we have that was written in (early) English is “This she-wolf is a reward to my kinsman” and it's anatomically accurate to say you are capable of speaking because you can choke on food.  Interestingly, the traffic term “roundabout” was coined by an American living in Britain and replaced the clunkier phrase “gyratory circus.”

 

    The grammar sections were fascinating.  The esoteric and unintended word “Dord” was mentioned, and it was fun to see verb options such as dived/dove, sneaked/snuck, strived/strove, and wove/weaved are still a “whichever you want to use” sort of thing.

 

    The “fun” chapters were . . . well . . . lots of fun!  The full gamut of topics there is: crossword puzzles, Scrabble, palindromes, anagrams, lipograms (huh?), acrostics, rebuses, holorimes (what?), clerihews (say again?), spoonerisms, amphibology (oh, come on, now), and Cockney rhyming.

 

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.4/5 based on 3,299 ratings and 1,372 reviews.

    Goodreads: 3.91/5 based on 39,484 ratings and 3,026 reviews

 

Excerpts...

    There is an occasional tendency in English, particularly in academic and political circles, to resort to waffle and jargon.  At a conference of sociologists in America in 1977, love was defined as “the cognitive-affective state characterized by intrusive and obsessive fantasizing concerning reciprocity of amorant feelings by the object of the amorance.”  That is jargon—the practice of never calling a spade a spade when you might instead call it a manual earth-restructuring implement—and it is one of the great curses of modern English.  (pg. 19)

 

    The combination “ng,” for example, is usually treated as one discrete sound, as in bring and sing.  But in fact we make two sounds with it—employing a soft “g” with singer and a hard “g” with finger.  We also tend to vary its duration, giving it fractionally more resonance in descriptive and onomatopoeic words like zing and bong and rather less in mundane words like something and rang.  We make another unconscious distinction between the hard “th” of those and the soft one of thought.  (pg. 87)

 

Imposing Latin rules on English structure is a little like trying to play baseball on ice skates.  (pg. 16)

    Frankly, I can’t find anything to grouse about in The Mother Tongue.  There are some cusswords, but that’s a given since there’s a whole chapter devoted to swearing, and it was enlightening to learn that the F-bomb is not an acronym of “For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge”.

 

    It was therefore somewhat surprising to see its relatively low rating at Goodreads (3.91/5).  Most of the criticism there was about perceived inaccuracies detected about some of the non-English languages Bryson mentions.

 

    For instance, one reviewer was upset by Bryson’s assertion that the Finnish language contains no swear words, and gave several examples to disprove this.  Admittedly, my knowledge of Finnish is zilch, I suspect Bryson’s is close to that level also, so he was most likely relying on some Finnish-speaking expert's “facts”.  But let's get real now; this book isn’t about the Finnish tongue.  The low rating given by this reviewer is unmerited, and, to misquote Hamlet, “methinks he doth protest too much”.

 

    For me, The Mother Tongue was a thoroughly enlightening and educational read.  This was my eighth Bill Bryson book, but others were all either in the Historical or Travel genres.  It’s great to discover he’s just as skilled when it comes to writing a book about Linguistics.

 

    10 Stars.  We’ll close with an old children’s riddle which Bill Bryson says comes close to being an example of a holorime: “How do you prove in three steps that a sheet of paper is a lazy dog?”

      The answer is posted in the comments.

Shakespeare: The World As Stage - Bill Bryson

   2007; 197 pages (plus ‘Extras’).  Full Title : Shakespeare: The World As Stage.  New Author? : No.    Genre : Biography; History; Non-Fiction; Authors.  Overall Rating : 9½*/10.

    “Hey, how much do you know about the life of William Shakespeare?”

    “Oh, lots!  He wrote a bunch of plays that we were forced to read, one per year, in high school English.  He lived in Stratford-on-Avon.  Or maybe London.  Hmm.  Or maybe both places.  I can picture his face – a high forehead with, bald on top, and dark hair on the sides.”

    “Not bad.  Anything else?”

  

    “Yeah, his wife’s name was Anne Hathaway.  They were deeply in love, just read his sonnets.  And, hey, I can even spell his name correctly: S – H – A – K – E – S – P – E – A – R – E.”  That’s about it.  Pretty good, huh?”

    "It is!  But what if I told you there are only three “originals” of Shakespeare's face, all done years after his death, and all very questionable in accuracy?  Or that Shakespeare only bequeathed his wife the “second-best bed” from their home?  Or that Shakespeare spelled his name all sorts of ways, but never the way we spell it today?  Or that lots of self-titled scholars down through the centuries have claimed he never existed, and that those plays you list were actually written by someone else?”

    “Hmm.  Then I guess I better go read a good biography of Shakespeare, to find out what the truth is.  Do you happen to know of any?”

    "Funny you should ask..."

What’s To Like...

    Shakespeare: The World as Stage is part of a biography series called “Eminent Lives”; more on this later.  Bill Bryson is of course a writer who could make a 250-page book on watching paint dry seem interesting.  That serves him well here, because the truth is, very little is known about Shakespeare’s life, which makes writing his life story quite the challenge.  Bryson solves this by writing a book focused as much on describing life in England in the late 1500’s/early 1600’s as on Shakespeare’s personal life.  He succeeds eminently.

    The book is divided into 9 chapters:

1.  In Search of William Shakespeare.

        How little we know about him, including what he looked like.

2.  The Early Years 1564-1585

        Shakespeare’s marriage and his three kids.  Plus how easily you could die.

3.  The Lost Years 1585-1592.

        Shakespeare goes to London.  Was he a closet Catholic?

4.  In London.

        The Golden Age of Theaters in England.  Talk about good timing!

5. The Plays.

        Which ones came first.  His writing strengths and weaknesses.

        New Words, New phrases, New literary devices.

        What lines and words he stole.

6. Years of Fame  1596-1603.

        Shakespeare gets rich and famous.  His son dies.

        He writes his best plays – Hamlet, Macbeth, etc.

7. The Reign of King James  1603-1616.

        His sonnets and later plays.

        His brother and mother die.

8. Death.

        Died in April, 1616.

        His family line dies out within a couple generations.

        Theaters die out too, thanks to the Puritans.

        Shakespeare’s reputation down through the centuries.

9. Claimants.

        Was there really a William Shakespeare?

        Identities of the proposed “pretenders”.

    Bill Bryson is best known for his travelogue tales, but I’m also impressed with his ability to vividly describe historical times (see here *** for an example).  The way he paints England in Shakespeare’s time is breathtaking.  Plague and religious strife were rampant.  Tobacco, a recent import from the New World, was prescribed for all sorts of health ailments.  Guy Fawkes and others plotted to blow up Parliament.  Uneasy lay the head that wore the crown.

    It sucked to be poor, and most people were.  Yet somehow, they had time and money for the theater, which had only recently sprung into existence.  And what a joy it was to go to, or even work in the theater!  James Burbage was the leading actor of the day, and Ben Jonson and Christopher Marlowe were other noted London playwrights of the day.   There wasn’t a better time for Shakespeare to show up with pen in hand and plays to write.

    The literary parts of the book are as fantastic as the history portions.  Bill Bryson is neither jealous nor in awe of Shakespeare, both the man and the playwright, and does does his best with the very limited amount of direct knowledge we have about Shakespeare.  When he’s forced to rely on conjecture, he lets the reader know.  He’s not afraid to tackle subjects such as: Was Shakespeare Catholic?  Was Shakespeare gay?  Did he plagiarize lines from other people’s works?  Was Shakespeare even real?

    The quibbles are minor.  There are a bunch of “extras” at the back of the book: a bibliography, acknowledgements, About the Author, etc.  But all of it seemed "skippable".  There is no such thing as a boring Bill Bryson book, but I did hit one slow spot when he went into length about the reliability of other biographers’ versions of  William Shakespeare’s life.  And at 197 pages, the book was over way too quickly.   

    We’ll close this section by offering three trivia teasers about the Bard of Avon.  Answers are in the Comments section.

    a. How many new words did Shakespeare add to the English language?

    b. How many different ways did Shakespeare use to spell his name?

    c. How many different ways has his name been spelled (in English only) by others?

Kewlest New Word…

Anatopism (n.) : something that is out of place.  (e.g.: an outrigger canoe in Madrid)

Others : Prolix (adj.); Lexeme (n.); Insuperable (adj.); Ambit (n.); Amanuensis (n.).

Excerpts...

    This disdain for female actors was a Northern European tradition.  In Spain, France, and Italy, women were played by women – a fact that astonished British travelers, who seem often to have been genuinely surprised to find that women could play women as competently onstage as in life.  Shakespeare got maximum effect from the gender confusion by constantly having his female characters – Rosalind in As You Like It, Viola in Twelfth Night – disguise themselves as boys, creating the satisfyingly dizzying situation of a boy playing a woman playing a boy.  (loc. 943)

    Among the words first found in Shakespeare are abstemious, antipathy, critical, frugal, dwindle, extract, horrid, vast, hereditary, critical, excellent, eventful, barefaced, assassination, lonely, leapfrog, indistinguishable, well-read, zany, and countless others (including countless).  Where would we be without them?  (…)

    (M)any of them failed to take hold.  Undeaf, untent, and unhappy (as a verb), exsufflicate, bepray, and insultment were among those that were scarcely heard again.  (loc. 1393)

Kindle Details...

    Shakespeare: The World as Stage sells for $8.24 at Amazon, which is not bad for a well-known author like Bill Bryson.  There are a slew of Bryson's books available for your Kindle, ranging in price from $7.99 to $13.99.

 O paradox! black is the badge of hell, the hue of dungeons and the school of night.  (loc. 1279, from “Love’s Labour’s Lost”, and considered one of the most unfathomable lines from a Shakespeare play)

    As mentioned earlier, Bill Bryson’s Shakespeare: The World as Stage is part of something called the Eminent Lives series.  There apparently are 12 books in the series, at least at the time Bryson's contribution was published as an e-book.

    All the books are deliberately short – 200-250 pages or so.  Each biography is written by an author you don’t ordinarily associate with this genre.  I gather the intent of the series is to write biographies for people who don’t normally read biographies.  I fall into that category.

    The 12 books in the series are listed in the back of Shakespeare: The World As Stage.  Some are about people you’d expect: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Beethoven, etc.  Some are about people I've never, or barely even heard of: George Balanchine, Frances Crick, Alexis de Tocqueville.  Some are about people that pique my interest: Muhammad, Machiavelli, Caravaggio.  Each is written by a different author.

    Most of these books are about 250 pages long, and the price range seems to be $9-$15.  That’s a bit rich for my reading tastes, so here’s hoping they show up at one of the discounted e-books sites at some point in the future.  Shakespeare did.

    9½ Stars.  Highly recommended, especially if you're bananas about Bryson, and/or don't normally read biographies.

One Summer - America, 1927 - Bill Bryson

   2013; 456 pages.  Full Title : One Summer – America, 1927.  New Author? : No.    Genre : Non-Fiction; American History.  Overall Rating : 8½*/10.

    Hey, do you remember what all went down during the summer of 1927?

    Well, that was a bit before my time.  But as a baseball buff, I do recall that the 1927 New York Yankees kicked butt that whole season, with Babe Ruth hitting 60 home runs and Lou Gehrig slugging almost as many.

    And upon further reflection, I think that was the year Charles Lindbergh made the first nonstop, transatlantic flight, going from New York to Paris, and all by hiself to boot.   But that’s about all I can come up with.

    Well, Bill Bryson has dug up all sorts of other newsworthy events that happened in America that summer.  Some of them were world-changers, others made a brief splash in the newspapers, then faded quickly from public memory.

    But all of them were important to someone, and, when written about with Bryson's deft pen, are fascinating to read about.

What’s To Like...

    The title tells you everything you need to know about the book: One Summer – America 1927 is all about what made the headlines across the country during a busy time in our nation's history.  There are gruesome murders, historical flights, memorable sports events, idiotic regulations (Prohibition), foolish business adventures, and many more.  Bill Bryson divides the book up into 30 chapters (plus a prologue and epilogue), and clumps them loosely into five main sections that focus on the bigger stories : “The Kid” (Lindbergh), “The Babe” (Ruth), "The President" (Calvin Coolidge), "The Anarchists" (Sacco and Vanzetti), and the catch-all “Summer’s End”.

    The topics in the chapters jump around a bit, which keeps thing fresh.  Bryson’s research is deep, fascinating, and meticulously detailed.  Almost every character encountered in the book has their own idiosyncrasies (aka, skeletons in the closet), and the “dirt” Bryson reveals will keep you turning the pages.  The last chapter in the book, the Epilogue, wraps things up nicely, and is particularly moving.

    The major storylines are of course interesting, but I especially enjoyed reading about events that have long disappeared into the mists or conveniently covered up.  To wit:

    Henry Ford’s insane attempt to build a company community in the jungles of Brazil (“Fordlandia”).

    The US government deliberately poisoning its citizens via industrial alcohol.  If you died from drinking it, well, you got what you deserved.

    Wayne Bidwell Wheeler’s zealous and insane efforts to develop the Prohibition movement.

    The origin of hot dogs.

    The eccentric and rich Van Sweringen brothers.

    The forcible sterilization of 60,000 Americans deemed to be sub-human.

    The cultural silliness of flagpole-sitting.

    The start of the sculpting of Mount Rushmore.

    The rise of the Age of Radio, and the dawning of the Age of Television.

    The book is well-formatted, with an Index, a “Further Reading” section, and some way-kewl photographs.  As always, Bryson’s writing, wit, and attention to minutiae will hold your interest throughout.

Kewlest New Word ...

Farrago (n.) : a confused mixture; hodgepodge

Others : Swart (adj,; archaic)

Excerpts...

    In desperation, lawmakers tried to legislate probity.  In Oshkosh, Wisconsin, a local law made it an offense for dancing partners to gaze into each other’s eyes.  In Utah, the state legislature considered sending women to prison – not fining them, but imprisoning them – if their skirts showed more than three inches of leg above the ankle.  In Seattle, a group called the Clean Books League even tried to get banned the travel books of the adventurer Richard Halliburton on the grounds that they “excited to wanderlust.”  (pg. 70)

    The plot of Rio Rita was interestingly improbable.  Set in Mexico and Texas, it involved an Irish American singer named Rio Rita, a Texas Ranger traveling incognito while looking for a bandit named Kinkajou (who may or may not have been Rita’s brother), a bigamous soap salesman named Chick Bean, and a character identified only as Montezuma’s Daughter.  These characters and some others of equal implausibility engaged in a series of amusing misunderstandings interrupted at intervals by songs that had little or nothing to do with the action that preceded or followed.  A cast of 131 and a full orchestra provided a great deal of happy noise and spectacle, if not always an abundance of sense.  (pg. 86)

 “As an author Lindbergh is the world’s foremost aviator’.”  (pg. 229 )

    As fascinating as One Summer – America, 1927 was, it was a slow read for me, mostly because I’m a history buff, and I didn’t want to gloss over any of the details.  But it was also slow because, outside of a couple grisly murders and executions, there’s not a lot of “action”.  This of course, is something Bill Bryson had no control over.  America was in between World Wars, and for the moment everyone was making money on the stock market.

    I’ve read a number of Bill Bryson’s Travelogue books, but I had never tackled any of his History-themed efforts.  OS-A1927 was every bit as good as books like A Walk In The Woods (reviewed here), and I may have to broaden my Bryson reads.

    8½ Stars.  Subtract 1 star if you’re into hero-worship.  Bryson has never been one to cover up the warts of our sacrosanct historical figures.

In A Sunburned Country - Bill Bryson

   2000; 304 pages.  New Author? : No.  Genre : Non-Fiction; Anecdotal Humor; Travel.  Overall Rating : 9½*/10.

    Australia.  The land that time forgot.  Also the land that the rest of the world forgets about.  Most people’s knowledge of Australia begins and ends with kangaroos, koala bears, boomerangs, and maybe a weird-looking opera house.  Can you name their Prime Minister?  Their ruling party?  Any of the Australian states?

    But Australia is a fascinating, exciting place.  There are so many plants, animals, and geological formations that are found there and nowhere else.  So in the late 1990’s, Bill Bryson made several trips there, to get to know the country and to write a book about it.  In A Sunburned Country chronicles his adventures Down Under.

What’s To Like...

     The book is divided into three sections – one for each of Bryson’s three visits.  The first was a train ride across Australia, from Sydney to Perth.  The second trip was by car, and covered all the major cities in Australia’s southeast quadrant.  The third trip, also by car, ventured into Australia’s smaller cities, and the interior.  There is a map at the front of the book.  Bookmark it (Kindle) or dog-ear it (book); you’ll be referring to it frequently.

    Bill Bryson’s activities in any given city can be habitual.  Find the parks and walk through them.  Find the museums and walk through them.  Find the used bookstores and browse through them.  Find the pubs and restaurants and eat, drink, and be merry.  Find the hotel and enjoy or endure the amenities.  This could get tediously repetitive in the hands of a lesser writer, but Bryson's storytelling is superb, and I never was bored with any of his tales.

    There are also numerous and humorous “asides” as Bryson becomes immersed in the local culture.  You’ll be mystified by the game of cricket; amused by the rabbit infestation; and amazed by just how many ways the fauna, flora, land, and sea can kill you in Australia.

    But Bryson also tackles more serious topics.  It may be amusing to envision the predator-less rabbits running wild across the outback, but the devastation they and other imported plants and animals did to the indigenous landscape is both irreversible and borderline criminal.  The small amount of forested area is rapidly being depleted (Australia is the world's #1 exporter of wood chips).  And even more critical is the way the aborigines were, and are, treated.  Heady stuff; not very funny, but Bryson’s insights of such issues are quite thought-provoking.

Kewlest New Word. . .

Antipodean (adj.)  :  the parts of the earth diametrically opposite – often used of Australia and New Zealand contrasted to the Western Hemisphere.  More generally, (anything that is) exactly opposite or contrary.

Excerpts...

    On my first visit, some years ago, I passed the time on the long flight reading a history of Australian politics in the twentieth century, wherein I encountered the startling fact that in 1967 the prime minister, Harold Holt, was strolling along a beach in Victoria when he plunged into the surf and vanished.  No trace of the poor man was ever seen again.  This seemed doubly astounding to me – first that Australia could just lose a prime minister (I mean, come on) and second that news of this had never reached me.  (pg. 3)

    “Dining room’s closed, mate,” said one of the two guys at the bar.  “Chef’s crook.”

    Crook means ill.

    “Must’ve ate some of his own cooking,” came a voice from the pokies alcove, and we all had a grin over that.

    “What else is there in town?” I asked.

    “Depends,” said the man, scratching his throat thoughtfully.  He leaned toward me slightly.  “You like good food?”

    I nodded.  Of course I did.

    “Nothin’, then.”  He went back to his beer.  (pg. 182)

 “I tell you, Barry, he was farting sparks!”  (pg.  92)

    The wit in In A Sunburned Country is topnotch; the narrative is totally entertaining; and the book can also stand on its own as a Tour Guide for anyone contemplating a vacation in Oz.  It is also obvious that Bill Bryson researched the subject matter thoroughly.  My only advice would be to read it in bits, to keep it from feeling repetitive.  There are only so many ways to describe the summer heat in the desert outback.

    I read very little non-fiction (maybe one book a year), because the books are often dry and boring.  So it was refreshing to read something from this genre that entertained from start to finish, while still giving me a much better picture of Australia.  I still can’t tell you who the Prime Minister is, but I am now able to tell you at least a half-dozen ways to easily meet your demise there.

    9½ Stars.  Highly recommended.

Notes from a Small Island - Bill Bryson

1995; 324 pages.  New Author? : No.  Genre : Anecdotal Travels.  Overall Rating : 8*/10.

    Bill Bryson was born and bred in the USA, but moved to England after high school and spent most of the next 20 years there.  When he decided to move back here, he took a 7-week "farewell tour" of the UK.  He toured the length and breadth of the isle, almost all of it by public transportation or on foot.

    He visited large cities and small towns; famous landmarks and nondescript pubs and hotels.  And in the end, he treats us to 30 articles about his stops along the way.  Each is about 10 pages long, and they're all much more poignant than any travel guide could hope to be.

What's To Like...
    Bryson's musings about his adventures (and misadventures) are amusing and entertainingly honest.  He struggles with the inconsistencies of British mass transportation, gets rained on a lot (especially while walking), gets schnockered a couple times (gawd bless British suds), and partakes of a lot of ethnic cuisine.

    Bryson pulls few punches.  Sometimes the food, libations, and/or service is good; sometimes it's terrible.  Soemtimes the people he meets are rude to him for no reason; sometimes he's rude to them for no reason. There's a kewl glossary of Britishisms in the back of book, and any book that mentions Chertsey (pg. 64) gets a thumbs-up.  Bryson's insight is apparently accurate; in a 2003 BBC Radio 4 poll, the book was voted "that which best sums up British identity and the state of the nation".

Kewlest New Word...
Parlous : full of danger or uncertainty; precarious.

Excerpts...
    Some people simply should not be allowed to fall asleep on a train, or, having fallen asleep, should be discreetly covered with a tarpaulin, and I'm afraid I'm one of them.  I awoke, some indeterminate time later, with a rutting snort and a brief, wild flail and lifted my head from my chest to find myself mired in a cobweb of drool from beard to belt buckle, and with three people gazing at me in a curiously dispassionate manner.  At least I was spared the usual experience of waking to find myself stared at open-mouthed by a group of small children who would flee with shrieks at the discovery that the dribbling hulk was alive.  (pg. 282)

    Suddenly, in the space of a moment, I realized what it was that I loved about Britain - which is to say, all of it.  Every last bit of it, good and bad - old churches, country lanes, people saying "Mustn't grumble" and "I'm terribly sorry but," people apologizing to me when I conk them with a careless elbow, milk in bottles, beans on toast, haymaking in June, seaside piers, Ordnance Survey maps, tea and crumpets, summer showers and foggy winter evenings - every bit of it.  (pg. 316)

"Hae ye nae hook ma dooky?"  (pg. 307)
    Don't try to read Notes from a Small Island in one or two sessions.  As Bryson himself notes, after a while, all the quaint little villages and big, sprawling cities start to look the same.

    To boot, Bill Bryson is often in a grumpy mood - about the frequency of the rain (ya think, Bill?); about modernization (things change;  get over it); about the drabness of his locale ("Bradford's role in life is to make every place else in the world look better in comparison.."), etc.  About halfway through the book, I took to reading only one or two chapters a day, and suddenly the book got a lot more interesting.

    NfaSI is not my favorite Bill Bryson book.  But he's a gifted writer, and this does bring back fond memories of my trips to England.  Plus a so-so Bryson book is still pretty good.  8 Stars.

A Walk in the Woods - Bill Bryson

1998; 274 pages. Genre : Anecdotal. Overall Rating : B..

    Bill Bryson's witty recounting of his attempt to hike the entire Appalachian Trail, despite being 44, not in shape, and not knowing anything about hiking. He's joined by his boyhood friend, Stephen Katz, who is even more out-of-shape and unknowledgeable than Bryson.

What's To Like...
    As usual, Bryson self-deprecating humor had me chuckling out loud. There's the savings-draining trip to the sports store, trying to pack without breaking one's back, the foibles of a pair of urbanites camping in the wilderness, and a guffaw-inducing meeting with a moose. Fortunately, the bears, ticks, and poisonous snakes stayed away.
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    You also get to share his joy as he beholds sunrises and mountain ridges essentially untouched by the human hand. And Bryson shares his research into the history of the trail, the US National Park Service, the fauna and flora, and the very mountains themselves.
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    Unfortunately, the chuckles-per-page diminish in the second half of the book. Maybe Bryson had difficulty finding something funny about almost dying from hypothermia. So the first half of the book (Georgia thru Virginia) rates an "A"; while the last half (Pennsylvania thru Maine) rates a "C".

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You dare to call yourself a hiker?!
    The Appalachian Trail is 2200 miles long. Almost all of it is up-and-down mountains on barely discernible paths. I once did a 10-mile hike in Boy Scouts, over mostly level eastern-Pennsylvanian terrain, in perfect weather, and at a leisurely pace. It took most of the day.
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    Bryson ended up walking 890 of those 2200 miles. That he'd write a book about this feat seems to have ticked off a bunch of self-styled "serious hikers". Personally, I'm quite impressed. I didn't enjoy AWITW quite as much as I did The Life And Times Of The Thunderbolt Kid, but it's still an entertaining book, and a recommended read.

I'm a Stranger Here Myself - Bill Bryson

1999; 288 pages. Genre : Comedic Narrative. Overall Rating : B-.

    Bill Bryson returns to the USA after spending 20 years in England. He buys a house in rustic, Newhartesque New Hampshire, and shortly thereafter, a journalist friend talks him into writing a weekly article for a British magazine called Night & Day; loosely themed around readjusting to American life. IASHM is a collection of 70 of those articles.

What's To Like...
    It has the typical Bryson dry, self-deprecating humor. Since they are weekly articles, all 70 chapters are essentially the same length - about 4 pages each. The topics vary widely, so if one doesn't float your boat, be of good cheer, you'll shortly be reading about something completely different.

    .It is obvious that Bryson reads a lot, and oftentimes that spawns the weekly topic. You will learn things like the origin of Drive-In Theaters, and that computer hackers successfully breached the Pentagon's security systems 161,000 times in 1996. He's possibly the only person I know that can write four pages about cup-holders (in the car and on the PC) and keep you interested. To appreciate that, try putting out four witty pages on that subject yourself.

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What's meh...
    While you'll catch yourself laughing out loud at times while reading IASHM, this is an easy book to put down. The problem isn't Bryson; it's the format. Being limited to four pages means none of the articles have any depth. One of the chapters deals with inherently good- and lousy-sounding words.

     Kewl beans and something I'd really enjoy, but just as soon as the chapter got rolling, it was done.
.The other format problem is the weekly deadline. It must be difficult to be newsworthily witty once a week, every week, for several years. What do you do when your Muse takes a couple weeks vacation? Some of the topics seem to suffer in this manner.
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Uncle John, you have competition...
    It took me a lot longer to get through IASHM than I anticipated. After reading a half-dozen chapters in one sitting, they all start to blur together. I think it would be better to use this book as a Bathroom Reader. We'll give it a B-, and recommend that this not be your introduction to Bryson.

The Life & Times of the Thunderbolt Kid - Bill Bryson

2006; 268 pages. Genre : Fiction. Overall Rating : A..

    I'd describe Bill Bryson as a kinder, gentler David Sedaris, although there is still a lot of hyperbole and caustic wit to go around. TL&TotTK is a series of memoirs about Bryson's boyhood days. He was born in 1951, so this is primarily about life in the late 1950's to early 1960's, growing up in Des Moines, Iowa.

What's To Like...
    Simply put - this is as hilarious of a book as I've ever read. From cover to cover, I kept laughing out loud, which was distracting to Liz as she read.
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    And since I was born within a year of Bryson, a lot of his boyhood memories are also mine. Things like : silly putty and slinkies; lincoln logs and model airplanes; Sky King and Roy Rogers; bumper cars and fig newtons; wearing galoshes to school and being sent to the cloakroom; and the widest selection of comic books that any generation ever enjoyed. Last but not least, the stupidest, annoyingest, inanest game/toy that was ever invented - electric football.
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What's Not To Like...
    Not much, since I give this an "A". Most of the negative reviews seem to come from dittoheads who are irked that Bryson at times reminisces about the political foibles of that time period. Yes, we had hula hoops and TV dinners. But we also had a House of Un-American Activities Committee; rampant segregation, and A-bomb tests in the Nevada desert that spewed radioactive fall-out all over the country. Sorry, guys. That's part of this era as well.

   .The other negative that got cited a lot - and I happen to agree with this - is that Bryson sprinkles the book with a few too many 4-lettered words. I have no moral objection to that, provided it serves a purpose. Here, it seemed to be forced and unnecessary.

    .Finally, while those aged 50-65 will relate to this book, there may be a bit of a disconnect for anyone younger.
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Where's Billy?
    For a popular author with a dozen books to his credit, finding Bryson's books in a bookstore is a daunting challenge. Yeah, I could ask the help desk, but where's the sport in that?
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    You'd think his books would be filed under "Humor", but neither store did that. TL&TofTK was over in the "Literature" section at Borders, but that was the only Bryson book there. This past weekend, I found a stash of his other books at the used bookstore under "Travel". They're still written in Sedaris-style, but deal with living in England, hiking the Appalachian Trail, and/or traveling around Australia. He has a couple linguistic-themed books to his credit, and I still haven't found where either store stashes those.

   .I don't think I've enjoyed a book this much since Slaughterhouse Five. I can see me going on a Bryson kick for the next few months. If you want to get a feel for the bright side of the 1955-65 decade, this is as good as it gets. As for its darker side, well, that's what the book I'm reading now is all about.