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In an ageing Chevrolet Chevette, he drove nearly 14,000 miles through 38 states to compile this hilarious and perceptive state-of-the-nation report on small-town America.From the Deep South to the Wild West, from Elvis' birthplace through to Custer's Last Stand, Bryson
visits places he re-named Dullard, Coma, and Doldrum (so the residents don't sue or come after him with baseball bats). But his hopes of finding the American dream end in a nightmare of greed, ignorance, and pollution. This show more is a wickedly witty and savagely funny assessment of a country lost to itself, and to him.
Travel through small-town America with Kerry Shale's popular BBC Radio 4 reading of Bill Bryson's comic travelogue.
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rockhopper_penguin I read these two books one after another. It wasn't a deliberate decision, but the two did seem to work well together. The books visit a few of the same places, and it's interesting to note how differently they are portrayed in each.
RedEyedNerd 26 American works published between the 1870s and the 1960s. Poems and short stories in full length, novels as excerpts. They share the small town setting as an essential ingredient. Editor's headnotes on the small town aspect of every work.
Member Reviews
Bill Bryson left his hometown of Des Moines as soon as he was old enough, emigrating to the United Kingdom and settling down as a journalist. He returned to America some fifteen years later to make a grand tour of the country, avoiding major tourist attractions and grand sights and instead exploring small town American life.
As one would expect from any Bryson book, The Lost Continent is very readable and very funny - yet it's also strikingly sad. The title refers to how much America had changed since Bryson left, and how it was lost to him - consumed by generic strip malls and franchise stores, and populated by people who liked it that way.
It was pretty well an ideal town - one of those rare American places where you wouldn't need a show more car. From almost any house it would be a short and pleasant stroll to the library and post office and stores. My brother and his wife told me that a developer was about to build a big shopping mall outside town and most of the bigger merchants were going to move out there. People, it appeared, didn't want to stroll to do their shopping. They actually wanted to get in their cars and drive to the edge of town, where they could then park and walk a similar distance across a flat, treeless parking lot. That is how America goes shopping and they wanted to be part of it. So now downtown Bloomsburg is likely to become semi-derelict and another nice little town will be lost. So the world progresses.
This struck a chord with me. What I loved about Seoul was that I could walk out my front door and be less than three hundred metres away from a grocery store, restaurant, bar, bank, pharmacy, fast food place and subway station, as opposed to my current home in an industrial Australian suburb where I have to get in my car and drive five kilometres to the shopping centre.
But Bryson isn't just railing against the destruction wrought by car-driven urban planning and unchecked consumerism; he regularly cites statistics on crime and education which suggests America is beginning to decline. This book is from 1987. Had Bryson visited today he probably would have had a brain aneurysm.
The sentiment is not confined to America. Bryson regularly savages the notion, still in full force today, that cost-efficiency is more important than anything else.
I left Santa Fe and drove west along Interstate 40. This used to be Route 66. Everybody loved Route 66. People used to write songs about it. But it was only two lanes wide, not at all suitable for the space age, hopelessly inadequate for people in motor homes, and every fifty miles or so you would pass through a little town where you might encounter a stop sign or a traffic light - what a drag! - so they buried it under the desert and built a new superhighway which shoots across the landscape like a four-lane laser and doesn't stop for anything, even mountains. So something else that was nice and pleasant is gone forever because it wasn't practical - like passenger trains and milk in bottles and corner shops and Burma Shave signs. And now it's happening in Britain, too. They are taking away all the nice things there because they are impractical, as if that were reason enough - the red phone-boxes, the pound note, those open London buses that you can leap on and off. There is almost no experience in life that makes you feel more suave than jumping on or off a moving London bus. But they aren't practical. They require two men (one to drive and one to stop thugs from kicking the crap out of the Pakistani gentleman in the back) and that is uneconomical, so they will have to go. And before long there will be no more milk in bottles delivered to the doorsteps or sleepy rural pubs and the countryside will be mostly shopping centres and theme parks. Forgive me. I don't mean to get upset. But yyou are taking my world away from me, piece by piece, and sometimes it just pisses me off. Sorry.
Part of this can no doubt be chalked up to an ageing man's nostalgia, but I think it is true - in every country, not just America - that things aren't what they used to be. As an example, all the old neighbourhoods of Melbourne are full of lovely laneways and colonial townhouses and European trees and shopping streets. Meanwhile the newer neighbourhoods, like the one I live in, are full of detached brick cubes and no trees and shopping centres enclosed by carparks. The really new ones, at the very edge of any city, are full of garish lavender and maroon McMansions, and these are the worst neighbourhoods of all. The newer a tram model is, the uglier it is. Federation Square (opened 2002) is the hideous counterpoint to Flinders Street Station (opened 1910). You can't have campfires in summer anymore. Ferry routes all over the world are closing down because of budget airlines. The world is definitely losing itself.
This is a good book. It cops a lot of flak for being "cynical" or "negative," which is rubbish. First of all, Bryson is honest, and is making an honest critique of modern America. Secondly, it is the job of a travel writer to have a bad time. Happy memories and good experiences generally aren't interesting to read about - and they certainly are't funny. Humour is Bryson's stock in trade, and this would be a much less enjoyable book if he wasn't constantly snarky and acidic. show less
As one would expect from any Bryson book, The Lost Continent is very readable and very funny - yet it's also strikingly sad. The title refers to how much America had changed since Bryson left, and how it was lost to him - consumed by generic strip malls and franchise stores, and populated by people who liked it that way.
It was pretty well an ideal town - one of those rare American places where you wouldn't need a show more car. From almost any house it would be a short and pleasant stroll to the library and post office and stores. My brother and his wife told me that a developer was about to build a big shopping mall outside town and most of the bigger merchants were going to move out there. People, it appeared, didn't want to stroll to do their shopping. They actually wanted to get in their cars and drive to the edge of town, where they could then park and walk a similar distance across a flat, treeless parking lot. That is how America goes shopping and they wanted to be part of it. So now downtown Bloomsburg is likely to become semi-derelict and another nice little town will be lost. So the world progresses.
This struck a chord with me. What I loved about Seoul was that I could walk out my front door and be less than three hundred metres away from a grocery store, restaurant, bar, bank, pharmacy, fast food place and subway station, as opposed to my current home in an industrial Australian suburb where I have to get in my car and drive five kilometres to the shopping centre.
But Bryson isn't just railing against the destruction wrought by car-driven urban planning and unchecked consumerism; he regularly cites statistics on crime and education which suggests America is beginning to decline. This book is from 1987. Had Bryson visited today he probably would have had a brain aneurysm.
The sentiment is not confined to America. Bryson regularly savages the notion, still in full force today, that cost-efficiency is more important than anything else.
I left Santa Fe and drove west along Interstate 40. This used to be Route 66. Everybody loved Route 66. People used to write songs about it. But it was only two lanes wide, not at all suitable for the space age, hopelessly inadequate for people in motor homes, and every fifty miles or so you would pass through a little town where you might encounter a stop sign or a traffic light - what a drag! - so they buried it under the desert and built a new superhighway which shoots across the landscape like a four-lane laser and doesn't stop for anything, even mountains. So something else that was nice and pleasant is gone forever because it wasn't practical - like passenger trains and milk in bottles and corner shops and Burma Shave signs. And now it's happening in Britain, too. They are taking away all the nice things there because they are impractical, as if that were reason enough - the red phone-boxes, the pound note, those open London buses that you can leap on and off. There is almost no experience in life that makes you feel more suave than jumping on or off a moving London bus. But they aren't practical. They require two men (one to drive and one to stop thugs from kicking the crap out of the Pakistani gentleman in the back) and that is uneconomical, so they will have to go. And before long there will be no more milk in bottles delivered to the doorsteps or sleepy rural pubs and the countryside will be mostly shopping centres and theme parks. Forgive me. I don't mean to get upset. But yyou are taking my world away from me, piece by piece, and sometimes it just pisses me off. Sorry.
Part of this can no doubt be chalked up to an ageing man's nostalgia, but I think it is true - in every country, not just America - that things aren't what they used to be. As an example, all the old neighbourhoods of Melbourne are full of lovely laneways and colonial townhouses and European trees and shopping streets. Meanwhile the newer neighbourhoods, like the one I live in, are full of detached brick cubes and no trees and shopping centres enclosed by carparks. The really new ones, at the very edge of any city, are full of garish lavender and maroon McMansions, and these are the worst neighbourhoods of all. The newer a tram model is, the uglier it is. Federation Square (opened 2002) is the hideous counterpoint to Flinders Street Station (opened 1910). You can't have campfires in summer anymore. Ferry routes all over the world are closing down because of budget airlines. The world is definitely losing itself.
This is a good book. It cops a lot of flak for being "cynical" or "negative," which is rubbish. First of all, Bryson is honest, and is making an honest critique of modern America. Secondly, it is the job of a travel writer to have a bad time. Happy memories and good experiences generally aren't interesting to read about - and they certainly are't funny. Humour is Bryson's stock in trade, and this would be a much less enjoyable book if he wasn't constantly snarky and acidic. show less
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 show more 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:
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. show less
Bryson, a native show more 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. show less
The 80s really weren't that long ago, but this book sure makes it seem like they were. Some of the travel details (like using an actual map) were positively quaint, some of the jokes made me cringe, and every time he complained about prices I couldn't figure out what he was so mad about.
I've been to a lot of the places he visited, and I think he captured the essence of a lot of different places very well. It was cool to revisit them through his eyes. And of course he had me laughing out loud a bunch of times—I very much enjoy cynical humor (although there was perhaps a bit too much of it in this book).
I've been to a lot of the places he visited, and I think he captured the essence of a lot of different places very well. It was cool to revisit them through his eyes. And of course he had me laughing out loud a bunch of times—I very much enjoy cynical humor (although there was perhaps a bit too much of it in this book).
'I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to'
And, as soon as Bill Bryson was old enough, he left. Des Moines couldn't hold him, but it did lure him back. After ten years in England, he returned to the land of his youth, and drove almost 14,000 miles in search of a mythical small town called Amalgam, the kind of trim and sunny place where the films of his youth were set. Instead, his search led him to Anywhere, USA; a lookalike strip of gas stations, motels and hamburger outlets populated by lookalike people with a penchant for synthetic fibres. Travelling around thirty-eight of the lower states - united only in their mind-numbingly dreary uniformity - he discovered a continent that was doubly lost; lost to itself because blighted by greed, show more pollution, mobile homes and television; lost to him because he had become a stranger in his own land.
The Lost Continent is a classic of travel literature - hilariously, stomach-achingly funny, yet tinged with heartache - and the book that first staked Bill Bryson's claim as the most beloved writer of his generation. show less
And, as soon as Bill Bryson was old enough, he left. Des Moines couldn't hold him, but it did lure him back. After ten years in England, he returned to the land of his youth, and drove almost 14,000 miles in search of a mythical small town called Amalgam, the kind of trim and sunny place where the films of his youth were set. Instead, his search led him to Anywhere, USA; a lookalike strip of gas stations, motels and hamburger outlets populated by lookalike people with a penchant for synthetic fibres. Travelling around thirty-eight of the lower states - united only in their mind-numbingly dreary uniformity - he discovered a continent that was doubly lost; lost to itself because blighted by greed, show more pollution, mobile homes and television; lost to him because he had become a stranger in his own land.
The Lost Continent is a classic of travel literature - hilariously, stomach-achingly funny, yet tinged with heartache - and the book that first staked Bill Bryson's claim as the most beloved writer of his generation. show less
Bryson, a native Iowan, abandoned the American midwest of his youth at the earliest opportunity to seek out a more refined and exciting life in England. In the mid-80s, he returned to the United States, deciding to embark on a road trip to revel in an odd sort of nostalgia for the wretched vacations of his youth, and also to discover the ideal American small town of movies. As Bryson embarks on his tour of his native nation, I'll admit I was a little nervous. I'm all for cynicism and sarcasm if it comes from a place of humor, but off the starting block Bryson comes off as a little too mean-spirited, shamelessly generalizing midwesterners into a group of well-meaning dimwits and deriding small towns a little too harshly for not being the show more idealized Hollywood small town.
However, as Bryson continues on his adventure, I found him a little less grating and a good deal more laugh out loud funny. As he tours the unlikely tourist hotspots of the east side of the nation, I found myself giggling aloud more than once. He revisits a few places from his childhood vacations discovering them to be both more and less attractive than they were the first time around. He muses on his father's cheapness, peppers the narrative with random anecdotes that pass his time on the road, and makes critically funny observations about what he finds in each of his destinations.
I wandered through the crowds, and hesitated at the entrance to the Ripley's Believe It or Not Museum. I could sense my father, a thousand miles away, beginning to rotate slowly in his grave as I looked at the posters... The admission fee was five dollars. The pace of my father's rotating quickened as I looked into my wallet and then sped to a whirring blur as I fished out a five-dollar bill and guiltily handed it to the unsmiling woman in the ticket booth. "What the hell," I thought as I went inside, "at least it will give the old man some exercise.
The best parts, for me, were when Bryson stumbles across places I recognized, mostly because most of the places I recognized were either so astutely, if cynically, observed by him or, uh, he actually liked them. His trip to Lancaster, PA - the tourist capital of Pennsylvania Amish country - is accurately and hilariously rendered, though it's kind of depressing on the whole. For example, this is, in all reality, what one does in Lancaster, when one has tired of dodging buggies on the traffic choked roadways...
I kept eating. It was too delicious to pass up. Buttons popped off my shirt; my trousers burst open. I barely had the strength to lift my spoon, but I kept shoveling the stuff in. It was grotesque. Food began to leak from my ears. And still I ate. I ate more food that night than some African villagers eat in a lifetime. Eventually, mercifully, the waitress prised the spoons out of our hands and took the dessert stuff away, and we were able to stumble zombielike out into the night.
Also, imagine my surprise that Bryson passed through my very own small hometown, and for once, actually seemed to like it. He does, however, comment on the shopping mall that was built nearby in my youth, and speculates that the shopping mall will cause the dereliction of another good small town. I'm happy to report, the town is fine. The shopping mall, on the other hand? Pretty derelict. I feel as if Bryson would be pleased by this fact.
I enjoyed Bryson's tour of the east with funny commentary and investigation of various and sundry small towns, and, honestly wish he would have stopped there. Instead, a little over halfway through the book, Bryson heads west in the springtime, and the book loses its focus. Small towns disappear as Bryson grumpily traverses the National Parks of the west pursued by one miserable weather system after another. Readers are disappointed along with him as he finds many of the stunning landmarks of the west obscured by fog and is dispirited by having to drive absurd distances to get to towns where the one restaurant is closed for the evening. The ending simply wasn't as humorous and kind of dragged along devoid of purpose until he nears home and discovers that maybe he's loved this great nation without fully realizing it all along.
This book is definitely more suited to the sort of person who likes to play Cards Against Humanity than to the red-state American patriot who will doubtless be offended by Bryson's codgery handling of his trip around their beloved nation. However, if you're the sort of reader who can take his observations with a grain of salt and even see the occasional, sometimes unfortunate, truth in some of his harsher appraisals, there's a good chance you'll get a kick out of this book. At least the first half. All in all, even if this isn't Bryson's best, which I doubt it is, I'm still glad to have much of the rest of his catalog on hand for the next time I'm in the mood for a laugh out loud funny travelogue. show less
However, as Bryson continues on his adventure, I found him a little less grating and a good deal more laugh out loud funny. As he tours the unlikely tourist hotspots of the east side of the nation, I found myself giggling aloud more than once. He revisits a few places from his childhood vacations discovering them to be both more and less attractive than they were the first time around. He muses on his father's cheapness, peppers the narrative with random anecdotes that pass his time on the road, and makes critically funny observations about what he finds in each of his destinations.
I wandered through the crowds, and hesitated at the entrance to the Ripley's Believe It or Not Museum. I could sense my father, a thousand miles away, beginning to rotate slowly in his grave as I looked at the posters... The admission fee was five dollars. The pace of my father's rotating quickened as I looked into my wallet and then sped to a whirring blur as I fished out a five-dollar bill and guiltily handed it to the unsmiling woman in the ticket booth. "What the hell," I thought as I went inside, "at least it will give the old man some exercise.
The best parts, for me, were when Bryson stumbles across places I recognized, mostly because most of the places I recognized were either so astutely, if cynically, observed by him or, uh, he actually liked them. His trip to Lancaster, PA - the tourist capital of Pennsylvania Amish country - is accurately and hilariously rendered, though it's kind of depressing on the whole. For example, this is, in all reality, what one does in Lancaster, when one has tired of dodging buggies on the traffic choked roadways...
I kept eating. It was too delicious to pass up. Buttons popped off my shirt; my trousers burst open. I barely had the strength to lift my spoon, but I kept shoveling the stuff in. It was grotesque. Food began to leak from my ears. And still I ate. I ate more food that night than some African villagers eat in a lifetime. Eventually, mercifully, the waitress prised the spoons out of our hands and took the dessert stuff away, and we were able to stumble zombielike out into the night.
Also, imagine my surprise that Bryson passed through my very own small hometown, and for once, actually seemed to like it. He does, however, comment on the shopping mall that was built nearby in my youth, and speculates that the shopping mall will cause the dereliction of another good small town. I'm happy to report, the town is fine. The shopping mall, on the other hand? Pretty derelict. I feel as if Bryson would be pleased by this fact.
I enjoyed Bryson's tour of the east with funny commentary and investigation of various and sundry small towns, and, honestly wish he would have stopped there. Instead, a little over halfway through the book, Bryson heads west in the springtime, and the book loses its focus. Small towns disappear as Bryson grumpily traverses the National Parks of the west pursued by one miserable weather system after another. Readers are disappointed along with him as he finds many of the stunning landmarks of the west obscured by fog and is dispirited by having to drive absurd distances to get to towns where the one restaurant is closed for the evening. The ending simply wasn't as humorous and kind of dragged along devoid of purpose until he nears home and discovers that maybe he's loved this great nation without fully realizing it all along.
This book is definitely more suited to the sort of person who likes to play Cards Against Humanity than to the red-state American patriot who will doubtless be offended by Bryson's codgery handling of his trip around their beloved nation. However, if you're the sort of reader who can take his observations with a grain of salt and even see the occasional, sometimes unfortunate, truth in some of his harsher appraisals, there's a good chance you'll get a kick out of this book. At least the first half. All in all, even if this isn't Bryson's best, which I doubt it is, I'm still glad to have much of the rest of his catalog on hand for the next time I'm in the mood for a laugh out loud funny travelogue. show less
This is the story of a man who travels the United States in the 1980s and records his observations with his sardonic wit. When viewed strictly in this sense, I was very disappointed. His comments about the people and places he visits are biting, harsh, and downright mean. Even when I agreed with him (and I did, a lot, especially his dismay at the lost places of his youth, the urban sprawl and same stores, the same roadside fast food joints, and so forth), it was at times, too much. About the only thing that made me avoid putting down the book altogether was that he was frequently insulting to himself - at least he is an equal opportunity offender.
Compare it to Blue Highways, a classic book of traveling across the country in search of a show more people, a place, and oneself. That author wrote with genuine affection for all of the people he met and places he visited.
However, the book is not about a man's trip around the US. It is about a man's search for home. He lived abroad for years, only to come home and find his homeland has changed dramatically. To come home and find your neighborhood changed, your grandmother's house demolished, etc, must be quite a shocker. Not that I excuse him for the nastiness, but it does make it easier to understand. It must be part of his grieving process. Though I have a sneaking suspicion he wrote it for a non US audience and this book is him making fun of us behind our backs.
When I put aside his disdain for all the people he met along the way, I found the book decent. I liked hearing about places I've been, and though I didn't care for the way he expressed it, I mourned along with him for the bits of lost American culture. show less
Compare it to Blue Highways, a classic book of traveling across the country in search of a show more people, a place, and oneself. That author wrote with genuine affection for all of the people he met and places he visited.
However, the book is not about a man's trip around the US. It is about a man's search for home. He lived abroad for years, only to come home and find his homeland has changed dramatically. To come home and find your neighborhood changed, your grandmother's house demolished, etc, must be quite a shocker. Not that I excuse him for the nastiness, but it does make it easier to understand. It must be part of his grieving process. Though I have a sneaking suspicion he wrote it for a non US audience and this book is him making fun of us behind our backs.
When I put aside his disdain for all the people he met along the way, I found the book decent. I liked hearing about places I've been, and though I didn't care for the way he expressed it, I mourned along with him for the bits of lost American culture. show less
Per qualche ragione che non conosco Bill Bryson non è troppo conosciuto in Italia.
Eppure libri come "The Lost Continent" sono una delle migliori descrizioni che abbia mai letto dell'America profonda, quella dei paesini e delle zone al di fuori delle due coste.
E' un viaggio nella memoria, nella perdita dell'identità e nella spersonalizzaione che sta arrivando anche in Italia.
La perdita della Main Street come punto di socializzazione a favore dei mall e dei centri commerciali. La perdita di punti centrali a favore delle zone specifiche.
E' un viaggio, è memoria ed anche molto divertente.
Un libro da leggere per capire meglio un paese che conosciamo molto nell'immaginario ma di cui sappiamo pochissimo nella realt-
Eppure libri come "The Lost Continent" sono una delle migliori descrizioni che abbia mai letto dell'America profonda, quella dei paesini e delle zone al di fuori delle due coste.
E' un viaggio nella memoria, nella perdita dell'identità e nella spersonalizzaione che sta arrivando anche in Italia.
La perdita della Main Street come punto di socializzazione a favore dei mall e dei centri commerciali. La perdita di punti centrali a favore delle zone specifiche.
E' un viaggio, è memoria ed anche molto divertente.
Un libro da leggere per capire meglio un paese che conosciamo molto nell'immaginario ma di cui sappiamo pochissimo nella realt-
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Author Information
70+ Works 136,293 Members
Bill Bryson was born in Des Moines, Iowa on December 8, 1951. In 1973, he went backpacking in England, where he eventually decided to settle. He wrote for the English newspapers The Times and The Independent, as well as supplementing his income by writing travel articles. He moved back to the United States in 1995. His first travel book, The Lost show more Continent: Travels in Small-Town America, was published in 1989. His other books include I'm a Stranger Here Myself, In a Sunburned Country, Bill Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words, Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe, Made in America, The Mother Tongue, Bill Bryson's African Diary, A Short History of Nearly Everything, At Home: A Short History of Private Life, Walk About, and Seeing Further: The Story of Science, Discovery, the Genius of the Royal Society. A Walk in the Woods was adapted into a movie starring Robert Redford and Nick Nolte. Bryson's titles, The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in Britain, Notes from a Small Island and Neither Here Nor There made the New York Times bestseller list in 2016. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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Awards and Honors
Series
Work Relationships
Is contained in
Common Knowledge
- Canonical title*
- Het verloren continent
- Original title
- The Lost Continent: Travels in small-town America
- Original publication date
- 1989
- People/Characters
- Bill Bryson
- Important places
- Des Moines, Iowa, USA
- Dedication
- To my father
- First words
- I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to.
- Quotations
- For one giddy careless moment, I was almost serene myself. It was a strange sensation, and it soon passed.
"I don't know, dear," my mother would answer mildly. My mother only ever said two things. She said, "I don't know, dear." And she said, "Can I get you a sandwich, honey?" Occasionally on our trips she would volunteer other pi... (show all)eces of intelligence like "Should that dashboard light be glowing like that, dear?" or "I think you hit that dog/man/blind person back there, honey," but mostly she kept quiet. - Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)It was the strangest thing, but for the first time in a long time I almost felt serene.
- Blurbers
- New York magazine
- Original language
- English
*Some information comes from Common Knowledge in other languages. Click "Edit" for more information.
Classifications
- Genres
- Travel, General Nonfiction, Nonfiction, Biography & Memoir
- DDC/MDS
- 917.30492 — History & geography Geography & travel Geography of and travel in North America United States subdivisions and modified standard subdivisions Travel; guidebooks 1901- 1953-2001
- LCC
- E169 .Z82 .B78 — History of the United States United States General
- BISAC
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- Media
- Paper, Audiobook, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 56
- UPCs
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- ASINs
- 38