Customer Reviews

The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America

5 star:		(100)
4 star:		(56)
3 star:		(61)
2 star:		(58)
1 star:		(66)

 

 

I had high hopes for this book since I thoroughly enjoyed and laughed out loud while reading Bryson's 'In a Sunburned Country'. I was more than a little disappointed after finished `Lost Continent' I came away feeling more than a little disappointed.
Before I bought this book I was puzzled at the contrasting reviews here and I initially took the most of the negative reviews with a grain of salt. I figured these were written by people who mostly just took offense way too easily and were unable to laugh at themselves as Americans. I have to say though, after reading the book I find myself agreeing with some of the negative reviews of this book.

First off, as an American that has lived overseas for 3 years now, I feel I'm more than capable of looking at America with an objective eye. I'm completely aware of America's many shortcomings - ie. the propensity for urban sprawl, the seemingly declining interest in it's rich history, the ever growing dependence on technology and increasing laziness that invariably comes with it etc. etc.

Having said that, I still regard this book primarily as just one endless, tiring, repetitive rant by an unhappy man. One would be hard pressed to find more than a couple instances where Bryson spent more than three of four sentences at a time describing anything he found ENJOYABLE. As one reviewer pointed out, Bryson comes across as being exactly like the kind of people he constantly complains about in this book...rude, ignorant, and, just like Bryson himself, overweight (apparently he hasn't stepped in front of a mirror lately). One has to wonder why someone would put out a book that is so consistently sour in tone. If I had just finished such a thoroughly unsatisfying and unhappy trek as this, I would be hard pressed to come up with a good reason (other than a quick buck perhaps) to actually write a book about it. Let me get one thing straight, if this were a book about Canada or anywhere else outside the U.S. I would feel the same way. Yes, there are a few funny passages in his book, but his air of superiority along with the overuse of metaphors pretty much dampen it at times. As demonstrated in `In a Sunburned Country', his strength lies in sharing facts and history of the places he finds himself in, and the humor is always much more engaging when it isn't over the top and written as if he's trying to impress himself.

There was a span of about 12 years between the writing of `Lost Continent' and `In a Sunburned Country', and it shows. This is a younger Bryson, a man who seems to have a problem with every little detail, and it becomes increasingly tedious and irritating as the book goes on. He rarely displays anything other than contempt for the places he finds himself in. A couple of other reviewers also made valid points when they found it curious that (with the exception of his Iowa drug buddy) he never manages to engage anyone in anything resembling a meaningful conversation to actually get a handle on their mindset (as he did in "In A Sunburned Country' for instance). His interactions with locals are mostly limited to ordering food at local restaurants and asking for directions. He seems perfectly content coming to conclusions about entire groups of people based on no real substance and communication whatsoever.

In this book, sadly, he comes across as nothing more than a sarcastic, anti-social loner with a bone to pick with just about everyone and everything. Any remotely kind words he has about anything (and they are few and far between) are all but smothered by the sour tone of the book as a whole. I SO wish I could recommend this book for others to read, but I'd be lying if I said it's time well spent.

Bryson was born in Des Moines, and moved to England in his early twenties, marrying and settling down there. This book documents a trip by car around America, starting and ending in Des Moines, after many years in the UK. The ostensible theme of the book is a search for the perfect small town; a sort of Ray Bradbury idealization of fifties America. There's no such town, of course, but Bryson just uses the theme as a springboard for some of the funniest descriptions, stories, and digressions I have ever read.

When I started reading this book, I laughed so much my wife wouldn't let me read it in bed. Then she picked it up and discovered how funny it was, and wanted to read it before me. Eventually we compromised, and kept it in the car; the rule was that whoever was driving had to read it to the driver. Several times, however, the reader was laughing so hard that they couldn't get comprehensible words out, and the driver had to pull over to the hard shoulder and grab the book for themselves.

Yes, he's a curmudgeon, as other reviewers here have noticed. That's just his style. He's not deep, either; his occasional ruminations aren't negligible, but he's no Mark Twain. But he has an acidly sharp eye for inanity and stupidity, and his anecdotal technique is flawless.

His other travel books are along much the same lines, but to me this is the funniest, though "A Walk in the Woods" does show he is capable of good introspective writing. "The Lost Continent" is sharp, satirical, acute, and unkind--wickedly funny in every sense of the word.

This is my third Bill Bryson book. Thank goodness this was not my first, for I probably would not have picked up "In a Sunburned Country," and "A Walk In The Woods."

Where Bryson's latest books are droll, witty and endearing, "The Lost Continent" is frequently petty, forced and mean. In this book Bryson travels around 38 states in a beat up Chevette, often through small towns and out of the way places not usually visited by many. He didn't have a very good trip.

Most of this book revolves around the author's put-downs of people he sees and caustic comments about places he visits. After a few hundred pages, the observations seem awfully gratuitous. Where disappointments, angst and difficult people were treated with amusement in his later books, here he often dismisses similar trials here with the brilliant and trenchant observation "FU". Not much authorship in those moments.

Not to say that there aren't some funny passages. Several times on the train, I found myself reading out loud. However, I also found myself speed reading ahead several times, an unfortunate first for a Bryson Book. Bryson's later works also weave a good deal of interesting historical background and place descriptions into the book. That is almost totally missing in this effort.

He occasionally comes up with some awfully good writing. For example, he described driving toward the mountains in Colorado as "driving into the opening credits of a Paramount Picture." (sic). Unfortunately, there are not enough of those moments and instead too many paragraphs describing how he had another bad meal in another bad town with too many ice cream and pizza parlors and not enough ambiance or fetching waitresses to suit his tastes. Bryson has produced much better. But don't let this book (or review) put you off an author whose books can be very satisfying companions. Just go for his more recent stuff.

Pity poor Bill Bryson. He had the chance many of his readers would love to have--travel throughout the US with apparently no money or time constraints. (Even if a Chevy Chevette may not be everyone's idea of comfortable travel!) However, the main word Bryson can find to describe places he doesn't care for is the oft-repeated "boring." The Mississippi River is "flat and dull," and merely driving is almost invariably "boring," unless the scenery is spectacular. Ah, what's a guy to do when he has book to write? Carry on, despite overcrowded national parks, sleepy small towns, ignorant people and the occasional threatening weather. Still, in spite of the negative attitude Bryson so frequently adopts, the book is entertaining and enlightening. Perhaps I enjoyed it so much because I agree with so many of Bryson's views about the over-commercialization of America's natural wonders and historical places. I also sympathize with his regrets for the lost small towns, particularly the downtowns which have been decimated by the development of malls, strip malls, large discount stores and fast food franchises until all small towns look depressingly the same. Perhaps the best thing one can say about a book like this is that it made me want to make my own journey of exploration, to discover the country on my own. And that, I believe, is the response any travel writer would love to have. Bryson succeeds and so I recommend the book to all readers who can smile at the foibles of America and Americans, including, perhaps, themselves.

Since many of the reviews below do a fine job of describing this book's general attributes, I'll just mention a few things you'd best remember when reading a Bill Bryson book, particularly The Lost Continent:

First, Mr Bryson's doesn't write guidebooks or serious travelogues. He writes anti-guidebooks. Much of The Lost Continent is a counterpoint -- indeed a cure -- for the attacks of 'Meaningfulness And Insight' one sometimes suffers when reading even the best of the 'serious' travel writers such as Jonathan Raban.

Second, he's not making fun of the places he goes, the people he meets, and the things he sees because he's a big old meanie. He's trying to be funny, and he tells the unvarnished truth about what he sees and experiences, unlike many travel writers --both professional and amateur -- who simply cannot admit they've come a long way to see something, only to find it disappointing. Mr Bryson is criticized in many reviews for being a 'tourist' not a 'traveler', but it's only tourists who think every sight they see is fascinating simply because they've chosen to see it.

Third, Mr Bryson's not 'arrogant' because he doesn't praise everything about America and Americans. In fact, if American readers can hold back their splutters of outrage, they'd realize very quickly that he's *including himself* in nearly all the jokes he makes. A surpassingly ignorant reviewer below has asserted, for example, that our Bill's a hypocrite because he makes jokes about fat people, but then dines on a six-pack and candy bars. Well, of course he does -- Mr Bryson's acknowledging that, for all his griping about fast food and convenience stores and fat bellies, he's no better able to resist temptation than any other American. How many other travel writers -- or any writers at all -- allow us to see them being so fallible? This is arrogance?

Finally, I would recommend that the careful reader of The Lost Continent will find much more here than humorous description and anecdote, although both abound. There's also a story. Its only real character, of course, is Bill Bryson, but it's a character who is ultimately open to and changed by his experiences, both in making his comic journeys and in the remembrances of his boyhood his travels evoke. Mr Bryson is seeking more than just an elusive epitome of small-town America; he's trying to learn how to be an American again after a long time away, and he's finding it tough going at times. As an American (an Iowan, even) who's lived overseas for more than a decade myself, I find this story more and more compelling every time I come back to visit both 'lost continents' -- the real one, and this fine book.

Highly recommended.

It seems that Bill Bryson is into the same things as me. In "A Walk in the Woods" he tackled my top hobby, hiking ridiculously long distances. In this book, he covers my other hobby, driving ridiculously long distances. Bryson's travelogue through small towns in 38 states is very observant and often hysterically funny. He's got good insights into the attitudes and friendliness (or lack thereof) of people in different regions of the country, and he writes thoughtfully on the destruction of America's small town charm by never-ending stretches of strip malls and fast food joints.

But even though Bryson is very thoughtful and funny, this book can really get on your nerves at times. This is because Bryson is an extremely arrogant and tactless man. He dislikes everybody with different backgrounds than him, and every place that is different from his home area. He calls people and even entire groups of people obscene names throughout the book. He's got a serious problem with fat jokes, obsessively ripping on overweight people in extremely cruel ways. (By the way, look at the picture of Bryson on the back cover. You can only see his head and shoulders, but he still doesn't look like the skinniest guy in the world). Bryson demeans people who choose to live in big cities, which he can't understand, and he demeans people who live in the countryside, which he also can't understand. He hates people who can't follow directions, but gets lost several times in the book himself. At the lowest points of the book, Bryson mentions how he wants to punch an old lady in the head for cutting in line, how he wants to whack a panhandler with a stick, and how he would like to slap a little boy in Vermont just for being ugly. And he's going to get in a lot of trouble if he doesn't tone down his descriptions of poor black people in the South.

Bryson also can't stand any of the places he visits. Through most of the book, he obnoxiously rolls into a location expecting simplistic stereotypes, then criticizes each place for not living up to his unrealistic expectations (a major problem in the section covering New England). He calls almost every small town backwards and boring without taking the time to explore, and passes judgment on large cities (Cleveland and Detroit) after driving right through without stopping. He even finds a way to hate the tremendous national parks out west, like Yosemite for having road signs that aren't descriptive enough, or Sequoia because he couldn't drive his car through a tree (and manages to insult the trees in the process). So I can sort of enjoy Bryson's books on a general level, but I sure was glad when he got back home and brought this book to a close.

This is the sort of book that prompts one to ask, "what is the purpose of travel writing?"

Should it inform us about places we will never go and people we will never meet? Amaze us with tales of grandeur and exotica? Must travel writers seek out and celebrate the remaining pockets of difference and distinction in a world all too quickly tending toward homogeneity? Or should they seek to unite us, teasing out threads of common human experience from beneath the misunderstanding and fear that so often blanket us when we contemplate The Other.

Of course, good travel writing -- from the journeys of Herodotus in a Mediterranean-centered world to Eric Newby high in the Hindu Kush or Redmond O'Hanlon deep in Borneo -- does all of these things, and entertains us in the process.

Not, alas, Bill Bryson -- his highest aim is to entertain, and this he manages to do roughly on the level of an extended fart joke.

In this book, Mr Bryson - an American who lives in England - goes on a car journey across the continental United States. He travels alone, staying in motels and eating in restaurants. Some evenings he finds a comfortable bed or an acceptable meal. These times, he is happy and he says nice things.

Much more often, however, Bill Bryson isn't happy. He dislikes the big cities, which he finds very big. He also dislikes the small towns, yes, for their smallness. He despises equally the conveniences of tourist towns and the inconvenience of towns that do not cater to tourists. He finds the East is too industrial, the West too cold and empty; the South is unpleasantly hot; there is too much corn in Iowa. On and on he goes. Everywhere, he finds stupid people.

When Bill Bryson is unhappy, which is most of the time, he vents his spleen on whatever town or city happens to disappoint him. Occasionally, his invective is amusing; more often, it is predictable and juvenile. A sample of the Bryson wit, picked more or less at random: "... his name wasn't Mr Toerag, of course. It was Mr Superdickhead."

As a humorist, Bill Bryson specialises in easy targets. Overweight Americans are particular favourites, as are those with regional accents. Here is a conversation between Mr Bryson and a Mississippi police officer, both of whom are in their cars, stopped at a stoplight:

... he said, "How yew doin'?" This so surprised me that I answered, in a cracking voice, "Pardon?" "I said how yew doin'?"

Bryson responds that he is fine, and the officer asks if he is on vacation.

"Yup." "Hah doo lack Miss Hippy?" "Pardon?" "I say, `Hah doo lack Miss Hippy?'" I was quietly distressed. The man was armed and Southern and I couldn't understand a word he was saying to me. "I'm sorry," I said, "I'm kind of slow, and I don't understand what you're saying." "I say" - and he repeated it more carefully - "how doo yew lack Mississippi?" It dawned on me. "Oh! I like it fine! I like it heaps! I think it's wonderful. The people are so friendly and helpful." I wanted to add that I had been there for an hour and hadn't been shot at once, but the light changed and he was gone, and I sighed and thought, "Thank you, Jesus."

So Bryson escapes from his brush with the law, but not from his stereotype of the South (or from any of the many other stereotypes of Americans). The above conversation, almost the longest in the book, is one of the few times Bryson talks to someone who isn't a waitress (another group he delights in mocking).

Perhaps we should feel pity for Bill Bryson as he drives around America, completely failing to engage with its people or to penetrate beyond the its service industries and, occassionally, museums. But he gives us very little reason to do so. Bill Bryson appears no deeper than his own shallow lampooning.

For a part of this book, Bryson is retracing the family vacations of his childhood. But in bringing these earlier adventures to life, he relies on more of the two-dimensional caricaturing that so fails to animate the rest of the book: his mother, says Bryson, spoke only to feed the family ("Another sandwich, dear?"). His father, more fully characterised, manages to be both the most interesting and the most sympathetic person in the book. Every summer, it seems, Bryson senior would load his wife and children into the car and drive off across the continent in search of history, beauty or adventure.

Although rudely depicted by his son as a skinflint, barely able to read a map, Bill Bryson's father appears to have been a man who was passionate about his country. In one scene, he is described spending an entire afternoon pacing off troop movements on some historic battlefield (much to the boredom of his son, of course). And, we are told, he frequently engaged in long, involved conversations with the strangers he happened to meet. Bryson senior was, in other words, a pretty good traveller.

Too bad he didn't write a book.

It would be a real stretch to say that Bill Bryson thoroughly researches everything he writes about, goes out of his way to learn about and see and document only the most interesting aspects of places, and presents his portraits of places fairly and with an effort to see every side of both places and issues.
A real stretch.
But, it wouldn't be a stretch at all to say that Bill Bryson is undeniably loaded with wit and humor. This book is, I believe, Bill Bryson's very funniest. I laughed so hard at his descriptions of eating in small town diners that I woke my wife up who was sleeping next to me, several times. I tried to read passages from it to my brother over the phone, but couldn't get certain words out because I was silenced by laughing, by the sort of full-body laughing usually only high schoolers drinking milk get to enjoy.
This book is not an objective or a thorough or a totally accurate picture of America; its passages about the West, places I'm especially familiar with, almost appalled me at the total lack of effort Bryson made to go out of his way to see anything other than major attractions like the Grand Canyon. Even there, he just stood on the edge and looked over. However, what this book is, is funny. Very funny. Dangerously funny, especially if you ever find yourself hiding in an Anne Frank-style bunker, living secretly in fear of the government, where laughing very loudly could end your life.
I highly recommend this book. Writers about American subjects will find quotable quotes on almost every region, and lovers of good comedy will find a very enjoyable read.
Plus, and I couldn't believe this, it's really well-indexed.

Bill Bryson can write, that's for sure. And he's sarcastic -- that's what drew me to this book. But he's also terribly insecure. While I wouldn't dare get overly defensive about America, I do take umbrage with Bryson's need to go after the easy targets with impunity. His caricature of the South was shallow and his stereotyping of the Midwest horribly unoriginal, but the elitist attitude Bryson had towards small town American folks was irritating. His experiences with The Dumb are universal -- I've had the same reaction to dumb people all over the world. Being dumb is hardly unique to the US. And yes, we might be fat and ugly in the States, but I would hardly turn to Britain to improve my dietary and fashion sense. Bottom-line, Bryson has some funny episodes, but he didn't try hard enough to be witty. If you want to read someone who can amuse you in his travels of America without insulting everybody around him, try Calvin Trillin -- the wit is original, the writing better, and the insecurities less palpable.

I'd heard many great things about Bill Bryson, so when a friend loaned me this book with gushing praise, I was looking forward to a good chuckle. The most I managed was a few sardonic smirks. Mr Bryson writes in coherent sentences, although in some cases, he should remember there is such a thing as a full stop and sometimes, it's better to say things in two or three sentences instead of endless droning. His observations aren't particularly eye opening. He thinks he's better than everyone else and that all his fellow Americans are overweight uneducated red neck trailer trash. He is in turn mean, nasty, condescending and superior. I thought maybe he was trying to be funny, but it certainly didn't come across that way.

Still, I kept plugging on throughout the book expecting it to get better, but it didn't. The way he described the America he saw made me want to avoid going there (even though I have been there and I enjoyed the country immensely). I guess what I don't like about his writing style is his air of superiority. It comes through in waves, although underneath he doesn't strike me as a particularly intelligent or interesting person. When a person becomes an expat from his own country and then comes back to write about it, you should at least expect some funny insights and fresh perspective. With this book, I found neither. Just a condescending moron who really should have stayed in England.

Overall, the whole tone throughout the book left me uneasy and with a nasty taste in my mouth. I certainly won't be reading any more of his books, let alone spending my hard earned money on buying one.