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The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America Paperback – May 15, 2001
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“The kind of book Steinbeck might have written if he’d traveled with David Letterman.” —New York magazine
An inspiring and hilarious account of one man’s rediscovery of America and his search for the perfect small town.
Following an urge to rediscover his youth, Bill Bryson left his native Des Moines, Iowa, in a journey that would take him across 38 states. Lucky for us, he brought a notebook. With a razor wit and a kind heart, Bryson serves up a colorful tale of boredom, kitsch, and beauty when you least expect it. From Times Square to the Mississippi River to Williamsburg, Virginia, Bryson's keen and hilarious search for the perfect American small town is a journey straight into the heart and soul of America.
- Print length320 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- Publication dateMay 15, 2001
- Dimensions8 x 5.31 x 1 inches
- ISBN-100060920084
- ISBN-13978-0060920081
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With a razor wit and a kind heart, Bryson serves up a colorful tale of boredom, kitsch, and beauty when you least expect it. Gentler elements aside, The Lost Continent is an amusing book. Here's Bryson on the women of his native state: "I will say this, however--and it's a strange, strange thing--the teenaged daughters of these fat women are always utterly delectable ... I don't know what it is that happens to them, but it must be awful to marry one of those nubile cuties knowing that there is a time bomb ticking away in her that will at some unknown date make her bloat out into something huge and grotesque, presumably all of a sudden and without much notice, like a self-inflating raft from which the pin has been yanked."
Yes, Bill, but be honest: what do you really think?
From Publishers Weekly
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
From the Back Cover
An unsparing and hilarious account of one man's rediscovery of America and his search for the perfect small town.
About the Author
Bill Bryson's bestselling books include One Summer, A Short History of Nearly Everything, At Home, A Walk in the Woods, Neither Here nor There, Made in America, and The Mother Tongue. He lives in England with his wife.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The Lost Continent
Travels in Small Town AmericaBy Bryson, BillPerennial
Copyright ©2004 Bill BrysonAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0060920084
Chapter One
I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to. When you come from Des Moines you either accept the fact without question and settle down with a local girl named Bobbi and get a job at the Firestone factory and live there forever and ever, or you spend your adolescence moaning at length about what a dump it is and how you can't wait to get out, and then you settle down with a local girl named Bobbi and get a job at the Firestone factory and live there forever and ever.
Hardly anyone ever leaves. This is because Des Moines is the most powerful hypnotic known to man. Outside town there is a big sign that says, WELCOME TO DES MOINES. THIS IS WHAT DEATH IS LIKE. There isn't really. I just made that up. But the place does get a grip on you. People who have nothing to do with Des Moines drive in off the interstate, looking for gas or hamburgers, and stay forever. There's a New Jersey couple up the street from my parents' house whom you see wandering around from time to time looking faintly puzzled but strangely serene. Everybody in Des Moines is strangely serene.
The only person I ever knew in Des Moines who wasn't serene was Mr. Piper. Mr. Piper was my parents' neighbor, a leering, cherry-faced idiot who was forever getting drunk and crashing his car into telephone poles. Everywhere you went you encountered telephone poles and road signs leaning dangerously in testimony to Mr. Piper's driving habits. He distributed them all over the west side of town rather in the way dogs mark trees. Mr. Piper was the nearest possible human equivalent to Fred Flintstone, but less charming. He was a Shriner and a Republican -- a Nixon Republican -- and he appeared to feel he had a mission in life to spread offense. His favorite pastime, apart from getting drunk and crashing his car, was to get drunk and insult the neighbors, particularly us because we were Democrats, though he was prepared to insult Republicans when we weren't available.
Eventually, I grew up and moved to England. This irritated Mr. Piper almost beyond measure. It was worse than being a Democrat. Whenever I was in town, Mr. Piper would come over and chide me. "I don't know what you're doing over there with all those Limeys," he would say provocatively. "They're not clean people."
"Mr. Piper, you don't know what you're talking about," I would reply in my affected British accent. "You are a cretin." You could talk like that to Mr. Piper because (1) he was a cretin and (2) he never listened to anything that was said to him.
"Bobbi and I went over to London two years ago and our hotel room didn't even have a bathroom in it," Mr. Piper would go on. "If you wanted to take a leak in the middle of the night you had to walk about a mile down the hallway. That isn't a clean way to live."
"Mr. Piper, the English are paragons of cleanliness. It is a well-known fact that they use more soap per capita than anyone else in Europe."
Mr. Piper would snort derisively at this. "That doesn't mean diddly-squat, boy, just because they're cleaner than a bunch of Krauts and Eye-ties. My God, a dog's cleaner than a bunch of Krauts and Eye-ties. And I'll tell you something else: If his daddy hadn't bought Illinois for him, John F. Kennedy would never have been elected president."
I had lived around Mr. Piper long enough not to be thrown by this abrupt change of tack. The theft of the 1960 presidential election was a longstanding plaint of his, one that he brought into the conversation every ten or twelve minutes regardless of the prevailing drift of the discussion. In 1963, during Kennedy's funeral, someone in the Waveland Tap punched Mr. Piper in the nose for making that remark. Mr. Piper was so furious that he went straight out and crashed his car into a telephone pole. Mr. Piper is dead now, which is of course one thing that Des Moines prepares you for.
When I was growing up I used to think that the best thing about coming from Des Moines was that it meant you didn't come from anywhere else in Iowa. By Iowa standards, Des Moines is a mecca of cosmopolitanism, a dynamic hub of wealth and education, Where people wear three-piece suits and dark socks, often simultaneously. During the annual state high-school basketball tournament, when the hayseeds from out in the state would flood into the city for a week, we used to accost them downtown and snidely offer to show them how to ride an escalator or negotiate a revolving door. This wasn't always so far from reality. My friend Stan, when he was about sixteen, had to go and stay with his cousin in some remote, dusty hamlet called Dog Water or Dunceville or some such improbable spot -- the kind of place where if a dog gets run over by a truck everybody goes out to have a look at it. By the second week, delirious with boredom, Stan insisted that he and his cousin drive the fifty miles into the county town, Hooterville, and find something to do. They went bowling at an alley with warped lanes and chipped balls and afterwards had a chocolate soda and looked at a Playboy in a drugstore, and on the way home the cousin sighed with immense satisfaction and said, "Gee thanks, Stan. That was the best time I ever had in my whole life!" It's true.
I had to drive to Minneapolis once, and I went on a back road just to see the country. But there was nothing to see...
Continues...Excerpted from The Lost Continentby Bryson, Bill Copyright ©2004 by Bill Bryson. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Product details
- Publisher : William Morrow Paperbacks; Reprint edition (May 15, 2001)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 320 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0060920084
- ISBN-13 : 978-0060920081
- Item Weight : 9.7 ounces
- Dimensions : 8 x 5.31 x 1 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #52,964 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #53 in Travel Writing Reference
- #89 in Travelogues & Travel Essays
- #141 in Humor Essays (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
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About the author

Bill Bryson was born in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1951. Settled in England for many years, he moved to America with his wife and four children for a few years ,but has since returned to live in the UK. His bestselling travel books include The Lost Continent, Notes From a Small Island, A Walk in the Woods and Down Under. His acclaimed work of popular science, A Short History of Nearly Everything, won the Aventis Prize and the Descartes Prize, and was the biggest selling non-fiction book of the decade in the UK.
Photography © Julian J
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I could've done without the fat women jokes (this was published in the late 80s, when our last "acceptable" prejudice was even more acceptable), and they were fairly numerous, so in spite of trying to consider the context of the era, I still took off a star. I think I would've found them obnoxious in 1989, too.
The rest was typical dry-humor Bryson, with keen observations about his travels, interspersed with pithy anecdotes of the family vacations of his youth.
But here's the two things that amaze me. He manages to avoid Texas (although the Alamo gets a mention), which is a feat in itself. And he reveals that in all his youth growing up in Des Moines, he never made a trip to Minnesota, which is literally right up the road. (Spoiler Alert) He finally passes through a patch on this trip.
He missed seeing some great places, and I kept wanting to say, damn, Bill, if you had only stayed on Hwy 10001 for another 20 miles, you woulda seen.... But what he did see and describe was pretty great.
For a trip down memory lane, or, if you're a millenial, a glimpse of ancient American history 😉, I recommend it.
Another activity I have done a little of and want to explore more of is a road trip across the United States. I drove from Atlanta to For Drum in Norther New York in 2019, stopping along Chattanooga, Nashville, Gatlinburg, Washington DC, Atlantic City, and then Fort Drum itself. Having read other books on road trips, I was hoping this one would be entertaining with all the sites and annoying things you find on road trips.
So, he must have done this road trip in more than one year. In some places, it says the places were closing up for the season like he was driving in fall. Then in the last part he says it was in May. That was confusing, then he basically just complained about everything. I can say from road trips, finding a place that sells sandwiches and stocking up in case restaurants are closed or full is essential. He was alone on this road trip and I would be bored out of my mind if I was driving over 13,000 miles alone. He also stopped at tourist spots, then complained they catered to tourists. I may read the other book where he is traveling with the same guy he traveled with in "A Walk in the Woods," but I do not think I will read any more of his books after this. He really came off as an unpleasant person in this book, just complaining and mocking small town people. I would not recommend this book for anyone.
I remember hearing his reading the book on the BBC as their Book at Bedtime and racing the following morning to buy a copy. It was that good!
Bryson is an amusing writer. I admit to openly chuckling on a number of occasions reading “The Lost Continent”. Here, Bryson takes a long road trip largely through small town America. He is often critical, often amusing and sometimes very flattering. Many people think that Bryson is too critical. But this isn’t fair. I find him to be quite open and honest. Like any country, America is not perfect. There is much to criticise as well as much to praise. Bryson gets the balance about right.
“The Lost Continent” is now more than thirty years old. Like most books, the passage of more than a generation means that some parts are dated. However, this is inevitable. It’s not a particular fault of Bryson’s; rather it’s the changing mindset of his readers. Most likely, if Bryson wrote the book today there would be different nuances. Nonetheless, he remains an often funny and insightful travel writer.
Top reviews from other countries
Bought in second hand but its almost new and no wear and scribbles.
Overall more than satisfied with pages quality font size, binding and one of the funniest books to read
I love all Bill Bryson's books and this is no exception. He writes with authority and with great humour










