Travel to United States

The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America

Format: Paperback
Author: Bill Bryson
ReleaseDate: 12 September, 1990
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Rating:

A bitter and unpleasant trip down memory lane
He greedily latches on to any stereotype available and exploits it. Bill Bryson crosses the line between humorous sarcasm to just plain bitter, hateful commentary on perfectly lovely spots. He happily criticizes events and places he doesn't even visit. I'm sorry he had such a miserable childhood and angry relationship with his father, but I don't think that justifies trashing an entire country. To Bill, I offer sympathies for a sorrowful youth that has obviously left deep an painful scars even well into his adult years.

I'm so sad to have spent money on this book. I loved Bryson's Walk in the Woods, and hope to enjoy the Sunburned Country. But the Lost Continent is going in the trash.

Not funny at all. Snotty to the max. Save your time and read something good by Anne Tyler.
It stunk! His snooty, snotty tone made me feel like a captive stuck in his car as he plodded blindly across country. I truly do not understand the hyperbolic praise lavished on this book. The notion of a cross-country trip rehashing childhood memories and providing opportunity for contemporary social commentary is a fine one, but good Lord this man couldn't be more snide if he tried! His goal seemed to be to find the bad in everything. I only feel sorry for him that he wasted his time and travels in this way. I did not find his rants and raves witty in the least; They were simply pathetic and unkind. And for crying out loud, has he ever heard of planning? He came to my home state of Massachusetts only to wander Provincetown a bit and then head up to Haverhill, of all places? It's his own fault for missing the beauty of this state. This is why they invented a little thing called "Travel Guides. " They GUIDE you in your TRAVELS to see the best of a particular area. Hello? Mr. Bryson? Ever heard of them? He seems to think any exit he chooses should blindly lead him to his "Amalgram," or perfect town. Wishful thinking, my snooty, snotty friend. Readers, don't even bother with this one. If I sound mad, I am. There's nothing worse than wasting time on a book hyped up as funny that is anything but. (I confess, I read only the first half - then I came to my sense and did the equivalent of jumping out of his front seat onto the highway rather than continue being stuck with his interminable griping. ).

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder
Virtually all of it comes off sounding vicious and mean-spirited, in spite of the author's intention of being humorous. I've thoroughly enjoyed several other books by Bill Bryson, but this one has to be considered a sad disappointment.
He travels across America in his mother's Chevette (doing damage to it and never exhibiting any sign of remorse), eats at dumpy, greasy diners so as to have plenty of bad food to complain about, stays at roach motels in order to whine about the lousy accommodations, gripes about the dumpiness of poor, small towns in the U. S. and then has the unmitigated gall to say that Lady Bird Johnson's campaign to remove ugly billboards from the interstate highway system was a colossal mistake. Yeah, Bill, your appreciation for the beauty of billboards shows what an eye for culture you've got.
He spends fifteen seconds passing through some small town and has the amazing ability to know exactly how everyone there wastes their lives. Whatever tiny sliver of some state he sees is somehow, to him, indicative of the entire state. And if he meets one person in a town that he isn't impressed with, it means that every single person in that state is somehow ugly, uneducated and overweight. Oddly enough, if he happens to encounter somebody who is well-educated, that doen't mean that everyone else is, too. No sweeping generalizations allowed if it would mean that something was good rather than bad. And his repetitious negative comments about the weight of everybody he encounters get awfully tiresome. That appears to be the absolutely, positively most important thing about all Americans in Mr. Bryson's eyes.
This entire book sounds patronizing and so, so smugly superior. Mr. Bryson probably pats himself on the back at frequent intervals for being so much smarter, wittier, better educated than anyone else in the entire nation. And the meanest remarks he seems to reserve for his own parents, who must have been more than glad to see him take off for Europe.

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