The news that Bill Bryson is to publish a follow-up to his 1995 travelogue around the UK, Notes from a Small Island, this autumn will bring cheer to readers and booksellers alike. Bryson’s affectionately jaundiced dissection of the foibles of British life not only sold close to a million copies, but was also the work that cemented his relationship with his adopted country when it was identified, in a 2003 World Book Day poll, as the book that best represents England.
In the years since, the boy who came from Des Moines, Iowa – “somebody had to”, as he put it in the oft quoted opening line of his 1989 American travel book, The Lost Continent – has progressed from an observer of life in Britain to an active participant via a series of public roles that roughly divide between the fields of conservation and science. His conservation work has seen him appointed a commissioner for English Heritage and president of the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE), where his efforts were rewarded with the backhanded compliment of a bizarrely abusive rant from James May on an episode of Top Gear. His status as a populist frontman for science followed on from his 2003 book, A Short History of Nearly Everything in which he roamed – “always at the very edge of my scant knowledge” – across many scientific questions from the big bang onwards.
“It was supposed to be a one-off exercise from someone who had always failed science in school,” he explains. “I was just so amazed that some human being had figured all these things out. Ask me now to work out how much the Earth weighs and I couldn’t do it, even with all the sophisticated measuring tools we have today. But someone did it in the 18th century. That, to me, is magical. So I wrote the book and prepared to move on to something else, which is what I normally do. But, in a very pleasant way, it just wouldn’t let me go and for some reason I’ve kept on being associated with science-related subjects ever since.”
Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America 917.3049 BRY Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe 910.045 BRY Notes From a Small Island 913.104 BRY A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail 917.404 BRY (See other side for more books) Where to find books by BILL BRYSON www.websterlibrary.org (585) 872-7075. The unavoidable, undeniable fact of the matter is that Bill Bryson's 'The Lost Continent' is not only one of his finest works, but one of the best books ever written by anyone in recent times about the USA and Americans. It is as funny as anything you'll ever read, as well as being touching, poignant and fascinating. The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America is a book by travel writer Bill Bryson, chronicling his 13,978 mile trip around the United States in the autumn of 1987 and spring 1988. It was Bryson's first travel book. A Walk in the Woods, by Bill Bryson About the book In the grand tradition of the travel memoir, writer Bill Bryson tells the story of his trek through the wilderness along the Appalachian Trail. Lost Continent, Notes from a Small Island), and books on language (The Mother Tongue.
Such was the popular impact of the book that there is a now a children’s prize for science communication awarded in his name, and in 2013 Bryson was the first non-Briton to be elected an honorary fellow of the Royal Society. This year he is the chair of judges for the Wellcome book prize for both fiction and non-fiction works that “engage with some aspect of medicine, health or illness”.
Although he says he is not confident judging fiction – “If it’s not PG Wodehouse I don’t think it’s my area of expertise” – he “adores” the two novels that have made it on to the shortlist announced this week: Sarah Moss’s Bodies of Light, which features one of the first female medical students in 19th-century London and All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews, which deals with mental illness and suicide. The other books on the list are Henry Marsh’s memoir of being a neurosurgeon and Marion Coutts’s The Iceberg about her husband’s death from a brain tumour, Alice Roberts’s exploration of human development from conception to birth, The Incredible Unlikeliness of Being, and Scott Stossel’s study of an ailment not even recognised as a diagnostic category a generation ago, My Age of Anxiety. “It will be an impossible task to choose between them and I suspect in the end it will come down to what is the book that we, the judging panel, love,” predicts Bryson. “It will be an emotional decision. This is the girl I want to marry.”
Despite his now considerable engagement with scientific affairs, Bryson is still at pains to play down his expertise, preferring to stress the enthusiasm of someone who missed out at school. “A lot of that was my fault in that I just wasn’t that interested, but I also think the teaching was pretty bad as I constantly come across amazing facts that I know I would have been interested in as a teenager, if I’d only been told. I assume some people were getting good science education back then, but I certainly wasn’t in 1960s Iowa.”
Bryson, born in Des Moines in 1951, has in effect written two versions of his midwestern upbringing: in The Lost Continent he took every opportunity to mock Iowa and its people; 17 years later in his 2006 memoir The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, he provided a kinder portrait. “I stand by all that I said in Lost Continent,” he insists. “But it was unbalanced. I didn’t look at the good side of American life. People from Iowa are basically very decent, kind and wholesome, and I kind of neglected that in making fun of them for being rural and out of touch. In hindsight I realise I was lucky to grow up there and then. But I still spent the first 20 years of my life wanting to get out. I resented that I had to grow up in cornfields. I wanted to be in Chicago or New York or Paris, where the lights were bright and something was happening. I felt very hard done by and it was only years later that I could appreciate that the place has a real beauty, albeit it one that might escape most people.”
Bill Bryson The Lost Continent Pdf Writer Online
Bryson eventually got away in his early 20s and first arrived in the UK in 1973 while backpacking around Europe. He got a job in a psychiatric hospital where he met his wife-to-be, Cynthia, who was a nurse, and after a short return spell in America they settled in the UK and had four children. Bryson followed in the family tradition – both his parents were newspaper journalists – and became a subeditor on the Bournemouth Evening Echo before moving to the Times and later the Independent. His first book was a guide to English usage, The Penguin Dictionary of Troublesome Words (1983).
He says he had a very satisfying and enjoyable career in journalism, aside from the “traumatic” experience of Wapping – when Rupert Murdoch moved his operation to a non-unionised print facility in 1986 provoking a vicious industrial dispute – after which Bryson ended up, “like a lot of people, reluctantly making the move and then clearing off at the first opportunity”. He finished his career in daily journalism at the fledgling Independent before attempting to become a full-time writer.
Although he had been writing magazine features in his spare time – “to get money for holidays and washing machines” – he now set about writing up a rapid-fire road trip around small-town America that he interspersed with memories of his childhood and family. So why did he adopt such a caustic tone for The Lost Continent? “I was going for the gags. I had never written a funny book before and assumed it was like doing standup. Gradually I learned that you don’t have to have a joke in every paragraph. In fact they work better if they take you by surprise.”
But he continued to poke fun at the locals in subsequent books that recounted a journey around Europe, Neither Here Nor There, and then Notes from a Small Island, which made his name in the UK, before publishing A Walk in the Woods about a trip along the Appalachian trail that established his reputation in the US. “And I still reserve the right to do that. Most things in the world are ripe for sarcasm. The world is crazy and there is a lot of stupidity and there are a lot of things that are exasperating, but more and more I’ve tried to balance that with some positives because there is also a lot of good in the world.”
Along with success came some element of “resentment” from established travel writers who objected that Bryson apparently wasn’t taking the genre as seriously as he ought to. “But The Lost Continent was really a memoir and I didn’t even think of myself as a travel writer and certainly wasn’t fulfilling a dream to be one.”
Bill Bryson The Lost Continent Pdf Writer Free
For a time his publisher disagreed. After the American success of A Walk in the Woods it was assumed he would now “do the Pacific Crest Trail or some other walk. They would have given me a fortune because they can sell the same book over and over again. But while I had a wonderful experience, I certainly didn’t want to write another book about hiking. For a start, nothing happens. You just put one foot in front of the other. You might have a great day, but it’s not an interesting thing to write about, let alone read.”
In fact, Bryson went on to continue writing books that could be described as travel literature alongside such diverse projects as a biography of Shakespeare, a detailed investigation into the components of a domestic home and a study of the American summer of 1927. In tandem with his writing life, his roles at English Heritage and the CPRE offered him “great privileges in terms of access to some remarkable places, but also some great frustration because when you want to achieve things you run into inertia everywhere. Even before we began to reach the heights of austerity we have now, mostly there was an inability to do anything because the funding was inadequate.” He says that today there are around 20,000 listed buildings at risk and in any one year “we might save 20 or 40 or even 120, but the great bulk of them just moulder away. Society doesn’t want to pay for it.”
While he says that in Small Island he “unhesitatingly took the piss, the book was unquestionably fond of Britain and the new book will be the same. Not that I don’t find things to complain about.” He repeats how much he “really, really hates this age of austerity. This is the sixth richest country in the world. We can afford to have things. When I first came here this country was much poorer, but much better looked after. Roundabouts had flowerbeds in them and things like that. There is this mania that we can’t afford things, which is not true. If we could afford it then we can certainly afford it now and as a society we can afford to put some geraniums in a planter. And if government really can’t afford to meet its bills then it should tax us more. It shouldn’t be cutting all the time and diminishing the quality of life for everybody. Many people can afford to pay more in taxes or in fees and I would rather we spent more freely and taxed more freely.”
He says it was some time ago that he realised he was making these sorts of observations as an insider, not an outsider. “Iowa is where I’m from. All my family are buried there and it is the part of the world I am most connected to, yet I’m not really part of it at all any more. My mother is about to turn 102 and she is pretty much my last reason to return. Once she goes I will have to concoct a reason to go back and I’m fearful that I won’t come up with one. For better or worse, but mostly better, I am here, as are my kids and my grandchildren. In practical terms, life is bedded down here, and also in a more emotional sense. I never even think that I’m here voluntarily, I’m just here. It feels completely natural. This is home.”
Dana Gillespie
• The winner of the 2015 Wellcome book prize will be announced on 29 April.