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Product Description
After ten years in England, expatriate American Bill Bryson was gripped by an urge to return to the land of his youth. Borrowing his mother's old Chevrolet, Bryson travelled 13,978 miles through thirty-eight states, seeing pretty much what he wanted to see, and a good deal that he didn't. He visited Mark Twain's birthplace and the place where Roosevelt died. He glimpsed the Grand Canyon through a thick fog and failed to find the giant Californian Sequoia you can drive through. At once a savagely funny portrait of contemporary America and a poignant memoir of lost youth, "The Lost Continent" is a comic masterpiece.
Amazon.com Review
A travelogue by Bill Bryson is as close to a sure thing as funny books get. The Lost Continent is no exception. Following an urge to rediscover his youth (he should know better), the author leaves his native Des Moines, Iowa, in a journey that takes 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. 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?
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