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.
