Notes from a Big Country by Bill Bryson

Bill Bryson, Notes from A Big Country (New York: Doubleday; 1998), 318 pages.

In 1996 or thereabouts, Bryson relocated with his family from England to a small college town in New Hampshire. Soon after his arrival, he was convinced by a colleague at an English newspaper (The Mail on Sunday Night and Day Magazine) to write a weekly column about America. This book is a collection of these articles that were written between October 1996 and May 1998. The articles are printed chronologically and cover a wide range of topics of potential interest to English readers. The book’s chapters include articles on baseball (written during the time of the World Series), the intellectual poverty of American television programs, the pervasiveness of drugs, advertising, congress, food, politics, obesity (how could there be a book on America without this topic being broached), the unique American holidays and how Americans celebrate them, and the rituals of fare welling a child going off to college. Bryson’s articles also contain a few articles on the oppressive bureaucracies one encounters in America (no doubted more oppressive these days), as well as numerous articles on the strangeness of returning to America after being away for a long time and finding that many things have changed and are not as they once were.

Bryson’s books are known for containing generous portions of smart-arse comments, complaints about stupidity and stupid people, and cruel humor often directed towards people simply doing their job. This book does not disappoint those Bryson fans expecting that kind of writing. You have to give credit to the man: he knows his audience. Nonetheless, this humor is at times forced, especially in articles dealing with new technology and having to file income taxes. Bryson complains a lot – he even quotes his wife who accuses him of writing columns that bitch, moan and complain. She is correct, partly. We should be mindful that these articles were written for an English newspaper and Bryson does well to pick the low hanging fruits of complaining about America in a way that appeals to English superiority and their apparent repulsion of American vulgarity. These are easy targets. Where Bryson really excels is in his descriptions of aspects of America that delight and surprise him. These articles are where Bryson’s writing excels. Smart-arse complainers are common: writers that can convey delight wonder and enthusiasm are rare. This is where Bryson’s real talents lie. In this book he shows glimpses of this special talent. As we now know, it took Bryson a few more years and a few more books for him to develop this talent and leave behind completely the callow smart-arse humor that appears here. This book is enjoyable nonetheless. The short chapters make it an ideal book for commuters looking for something to make their daily journeys quickly pass, as well as for men who like to do their reading in the smallest room in the house. Time has dated a few of the chapters, but on balance, this is an enjoyable book that has something for all adults.

The Lost Continent by Bill Bryson

Bill Bryson, "The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America," (London: Abacus Books; 1990), 293 pages.

In the late 1908s, Bill Bryson, an England-based American writer, returned to the United States to retrace the travels taken on family vacations during his youth. The travels he took were the material for this book. Bryson wanted to visit what he called the magical places of his youth, or perhaps more accurately, the places he visited on family vacations of his youth that formed magical memories for him. Motivated by the recent passing of his father, a semi-famous baseball writer, and looming middle-age, Bryson returned to his home town, borrowed a car, and set out to see small town America. His journey was not just a retracing footsteps of old trips, it also took on a quest to find the dreamy small town of the movie of his youth, a timeless place where Bing Crosby would be the priest, Jimmy Stewart the major, Fred Macmurray the high school principal, and Henry Fonda the owner of the gas station. Bryson called this fictional town Amalgam, a mixture of the picturesque towns encountered in fiction.

Bryson traveled from Des Moines, Iowa to all corners of the lower 48 states of the United States. The book contains detailed descriptions of the places he visited, together with reflections from his childhood. Bryson writes with perception, accuracy and wit. He captures the vast contrasts in the United States, the gaps between the wealthy and the poor, the prevalence of violent crime, and America's large scale abandonment of small town "high street" commercial life in favor of large scale commerce of big box stores and shopping malls. Bryson praises the staggering physical beauty of the United States while simultaneously recoiling at the homogenization of its look alike suburban developments, gas stations, motels and fast food outlets frequented by overweight hicks wearing bad clothes.

The Lost Continent established Bryson's reputation as a humorous travel writer. At times he is a rude smart-alec that prompts deep belly laughs in reader. At times he is cruel when he makes fun of the local residents of the small towns he visits. At the time of the writing of this book, Bryson has lived outside the United States for a long time. This book shows that the America of his youth is gone; Americans' way of life and their towns and cities have changes from how he remembers them. It’s as though Bryson is a foreigner in his own country and he is disgusted with a lot of what he sees. Despite his smart-alec outrage and humorous put-downs, Bryson writes quite beautifully about the places he visits, most notably the Henry Ford Museum in Detroit, Bryce Canyon National Park in Utah, the Loretto Chapel in Santa Fe, and numerous small towns in New England and the Mid West. The book also contains many historical fact that enable Bryson to provide a back story to the places he visited thereby acting as a story teller and educator for the reader. Bryson's eye for detail, love of useful facts, historical details, and good yarns are his great strength. His gift is to tell great stories about significant human achievements and follies that move and excite people. In The Lost Continent we see the potential he developed later on in more serious and scholarly books.

If this book has a weakness it’s the uneven pace. Bryson starts slowly, describing in great detail his travels on the Iowa and Illinois back roads. It’s as though he is travelling slowly, but writing a lot. By the end of the book, Bryson covers great distances with less detail. As times it appears as though he is racing across the western states as though he is on a deadline to traverse these great distances in a short period of time and in as few pages as possible so he can flop over the finish line in time for his return flight to England. The pace is that of a sprinter compared to the leisurely stroll at the start of the book. If you can get past this minor blemish, Bryson's "culture shock" and humorous self-obsession with how America has changed, you should enjoy this book for its moments of serious reflection and first-rate story telling about things that both tarnish and make America great. These alone are worth the purchase price of this book.

"In a Sunburned Country'" by Bill Bryson

In a Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson, (New York, Broadway Books, 2001)

ISBN 0-7679-0386-2.

Bill Bryson's In a Sunburned Country (also titled Down Under in some markets) is an account of his travels in Australia in the 1990's. The title, as Bryson acknowledges, is taken from a poem much beloved in Australia, but hardly known elsewhere. The fact that this poem is largely ignored and overlooked outside Australia is very appropriate considering that Bryson's book is about a largely ignored and overlooked country. The world outside Australia knows that its there yet, for the most part, considers it not worth of its attention. This is quite understandable when you consider that Australia is a largely and empty country. Its also a long way from nearly everywhere, making access difficult, expensive and time consuming. Its population is small by world standards and its place in the world is largely peripheral. Its sports are of little interest, and it doesn't cause trouble or upset other nations. Bryson's view is that we are all the poorer for our ignorance of Australia: to him its a fascinating place populated by good-natured people where interesting things happen. Bryson takes it upon himself to evangelise to the world with a message that we should pay a lot more attention to this ancient and distant land.

Bryson's recalls a series of journeys. In the first section, he spends a few days in Sydney prior to traveling to Perth by train on the Indian-Pacific Railway, the second longest train journey in the world after the Trans-Siberian Railway. He breaks his train trip at the old mining town of Broken Hill, and makes a side journey by four wheel drive vehicle to the opal mining town of White Cliffs, notable for its inhabitants' tendency to live in underground accommodation dug into the hills, done primarily to escape the oppressive heat.

In his second narrative, Bryson explores Sydney and its surrounds, before traveling west by car through the Blue Mountains to various agricultural and horticultural areas. He drives onward to Canberra (Australia's unusual capital city), Adelaide (the only major city not to be settled convicts), and then to Melbourne, where he is joined a former newspaper colleague who shows him the sights of the region.

Bryson then travels by car from Sydney to Surfer's Paradise. During this journey north up part of Australia's ridiculously long east cost, he detours to visit the site of an Aboriginal massacre, a place even ignored or forgotten by Australians. After a plane flight to tropical Cairns, he "dives" on the Great Barrier Reef. After another plane flight to Darwin, he and a colleague drive south through the Northern Territory to Alice Springs, and then to Ayers Rock/Uluru. His final narrative comprises an account of his exploration of the Perth region, and his exploration of the coast of Western Australia north of Perth.

It would not surprise readers familiar with Bryson's other book to know that he again excels at meshing his pithy, humourous and sometimes sarcastic observations with a wide and detailed reading of history (both recent and not so recent), which place many events in context, and gives rise to occasional hilarity. For example, Bryson was startled to read that in 1967, the then Australian Prime Minister (Harold Holt), while one day walking along the beach, plunged into the surf for a swim and was never seen again. Bryson was both astounded that a county could have a Prime Minister that could just disappear, and that news of this event had failed to reach him. He later views Holt's official portrait in Canberra, and visits the beach where he vanished. Upon leaving the beach, a guide almost as an afterthought, tells him that a memorial was built to honor Holt, and the memorial was a municipal swimming pool.

Bryson's incurable curiosity, wide reading, enthusiasm, optimism and openness to the unfamiliar is engaging and effective. His genuine enthusiasm and love for Australia and makes this book immensely enjoyable and makes every reader want to pay more attention to this exciting, isolated and overlooked destination.