Shakespeare: The World as a Stage by Bill Bryson

(Book Review )

This book has been making the rounds at my office lately. A co-worker passed it on to me with the words: “This is the best book I’ve read in years. Possibly, the best book I’ve ever read.”

That, you'll agree, is high praise indeed. I can’t go quite that far in my own recommendation. But I will say it was a very readable, and very enjoyable, little book.

Even before a co-worker pressed this book on me, it has been on my list of “books-to-get-around-to-reading-eventually.”
I like Bill Bryson (see my reviews of other Bryson books, The Mother Tongue, The Lost Continent, A Walk in the Woods, Down Under, and The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid.)
And, as a graduate of a couple Shakespeare courses in university, I have some interest in Shakespeare (although I'm far from an expert).
I didn’t know anything about his life, but I was moderately curious about it and more than willing to be guided through by a talented writer like Bryson.

Since I don’t know anything about the life of Shakespeare, I can’t really vouch for the accuracy of this book. I’ll leave that to other reviewers. What I can say is that this book is fun to read. It’s got the warm conversational tone you would expect from Bryson, plus the usual Bryson humour, but it is also packed full of interesting little tidbits of information about Shakespeare and the times he lives in.

The central conceit (or joke) of the book is that we know so little of Shakespeare’s life that it’s almost impossible to make a book out of it, but let’s try anyway. Bryson lays this out in the first chapter.

To answer the obvious question, this book was written not so much because the world needs another book on Shakespeare, as because this series does. [This book is part of the Harper Collins Series of Biographies "Eminent Lives" (W).] This idea is a simple one: to see how much of Shakespeare we can know, really know, from the record.
Which is one reason, of course, it’s so slender.

You wouldn’t think this would make much of a premise for a book, but Bryson pulls it off.

Bryson lays out the bare facts we know about Shakespeare, and then explains why we know what we know, and why it is that we don’t know much else.
In doing so, he frequently pokes fun of eccentric Shakespeare scholars, who have often spent years and gone to great lengths to search through thousands of 16th century documents just to establish the little that we do know about Shakespeare.
On the other hand, Bryson also makes fun of other Shakespeare biographers who fill in the historical gaps by sometimes making wild inferences about Shakespeare’s life based on questionable assumptions.

And along the way, Bryson drops in the few little facts we know about Shakespeare, and also talks a bit about the life and times Shakespeare lived in.

In doing so, Bryson is easily able to stretch out the facts into a very readable 195 pages.

What else is there really to say about this book?

...well, I guess if I were pressed, I could come up with a few notes and nitpicks.

* The section on Shakespeare’s vocabulary and his contributions to the English language is essentially a repeat of information Bryson has already included in his previous work The Mother Tongue. So if you’ve already read The Mother Tongue, it’s slightly tiresome to have to read this same information twice. However this makes up only a small section of the book, (only 6 pages, 108-114) so it’s forgivable.

* There were a few points in this book that left me mildly confused, and there are a few points I would have liked to learn more about.
Maybe it’s just me as a history buff, but I would have enjoyed more discussion about the politics and ideologies behind Shakespeare’s history plays. I’ve heard before that many of Shakespeare’s history plays were designed to reinforce the claims to the throne of Elizabeth I and James I respectively, but I don’t know as much about this as I would like. Bryson mentions in passing that Macbeth makes reference to the gunpowder plot, but he doesn’t give the actual line. I would have liked to read the actual lines.
Also I would have liked some clearer idea of how much we know of Shakespeare’s contemporaries. For example on page 194, Bryson mentions in passing that Ben Johnson kept private notebooks. How much can we know about Ben Johnson’s life through his private notebooks? How common a practice was this in the 17th century?

And there are various other questions that are still lingering in my mind after reading this book.

But on the whole, considering how easy this book is to read and how slender it is, you get a good education on Shakespeare for very little effort. You can't beat that.

Link of the Day
Somebody Else’s Atrocities, “Ideal Illusions: How the U.S. Gov’t Co-Opted Human Rights”

Shakespeare: The World as a Stage by Bill Bryson: Book Review (Scripted)

Link of the Day
The Crisis in American Walking: How we got off the pedestrian path.

To which I add a few brief thoughts of my own.
I've not done any research to support this, but I believe that Americans walk less not just because driving is easier, but because it is almost impossible to walk anywhere in American cities.
To give examples from my hometown of Grand Rapids, Michigan: it is almost completely impossible to walk down any part of 28th street without constantly feeling like your putting your life at risk. I the summer, maybe you can get away with walking across car parking lots and across lawns, leaping over the occasional drainage ditch. In the winter, forget it. And at many places it's just about impossible to cross the street, even at the traffic signal.
Cycling down the street creates the same problems.
Also there is no pedestrian access to many of the major shopping malls in the city.

If we could redesign our cities to make them more pedestrian friendly, I believe this would solve both the obesity problem in America, and also significantly cut down on pollution. Americans aren't genetically predisposed to be lazy, but we live in cities in which you can't walk anywhere even if you wanted to.

On the same topic: I'm also reminded of this passage from Bill Bryson's book A Walk in the Woods. I think Bryson expertly describes here the problem of trying to walk anywhere in America. I have many similar stories myself, one of once trying to get to a shopping mall on foot.


Waynesboro had a traditional, vaguely pleasant central business district covering five or six square blocks, but, as so often these days, most retail businesses had moved out to shopping centers on the periphery, leaving little but a sprinkling of banks, insurance offices, and dusty thrift stores or secondhand shops in what presumably was once a thriving downtown. Lots of shops were dark and bare; nowhere could I find a store at which to get insect repellent. A man outside the post office suggested I try Kmart.

"Where's your car?" he said, preparatory to giving directions.

"I don't have a car."

That stopped him. "Really? It's over a mile, I'm afraid."

"That's OK."

He gave his head a little dubious shake, as if disowning responsibility for what he was about to tell me. "Well, then what you want to do is go up Broad Street, take a right at the Burger King, and keep on going. But, you know, when I think about it, it's well over a mile-maybe a mile and a half, mile and three-quarters. You walking back as well?"

"Yeah."

Another shake. "Long way."

"I'll take emergency provisions."

If he realized this was a joke he didn't show it. "Well, good luck to you," he said.

"Thank you."

"You know, there's a cab company around the corner," he offered helpfully as an afterthought.

"I actually prefer to walk," I explained.

He nodded uncertainly. "Well, good luck to you," he said again.

So I walked. It was a warm afternoon, and it felt wonderful-you can't believe how wonderful-to be at large without a pack, bouncy and unburdened. With a pack you walk at a tilt, hunched and pressed forward, your eyes on the ground. You trudge; it is all you can do. Without, you are liberated. You walk erect. You look around. You spring. You saunter. You amble.

Or at least you do for four blocks. Then you come to a mad junction at Burger King and discover that the new six-lane road to Kmart is long, straight, very busy, and entirely without facilities for pedestrians-no sidewalks, no pedestrian crossings, no central refuges, no buttons to push for a WALK signal at lively intersections. I walked through gas station and motel forecourts and across restaurant parking lots, clambered over concrete barriers, crossed lawns, and pushed through neglected ranks of privet or honey-suckle at property boundaries. At bridges over creeks and culverts-and goodness me how developers love a culvert-I had no choice but to walk on the road, pressed against the dusty railings and causing less attentive cars to swerve to avoid me. Four times I was honked at for having the temerity to proceed through town without benefit of metal. One bridge was so patently dangerous that I hesitated at it. The creek it crossed was only a reedy trickle, narrow enough to step across, so I decided to go that way. I slid and scampered down the bank, found myself in a hidden zone of sucking grey mud, pitched over twice, hauled myself up the other side, pitched over again, and emerged at length streaked and speckled with mud and extravagantly decorated with burrs. When I finally reached the Kmart Plaza I discovered that I was on the wrong side of the road and had to dash through six lanes of hostile traffic. By the time I crossed the parking lot and stepped into the air-conditioned, Muzak-happy world of Kmart I was as grubby as if I had been on the trail, and trembling all over.

The Kmart, it turned out, didn't stock insect repellent.

So I turned around and set off back to town, but this time, in a burst of madness I don't even want to go into, I headed home cross country, over farm fields and through a zone of light industry. I tore my jeans on barbed wire and got muddier still.

Down Under by Bill Bryson

(Book Review)

I actually read the British edition of this book. (Some British friends were moving out of their apartment in Japan, and gave it to me before they left.)
I flipped through the American version, and there do appear to be some differences between them. I'm not sure if this is a major issue or not, but I've decided to play it safe and review this under the British title "Down Under", even though it is probably more familiar in America as "In a Sunburned Country."

I've discovered Bill Bryson a bit late, but it's safe to say I'm becoming a fan. (For other books of his that I've read, see also:
"The Mother Tongue",
"A Walk in the Woods",
"The Lost Continent",
and "The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid".

Outside of Bryson, I'm not really familiar with travel writers, but I always pictured the genre as filled with a lot of books about strong people going through rough places.

Bryson, however, seems to spend a lot of time talking about where he stopped for a cup of coffee. Or the food he ate at the hotel. Or the conversation he had with a waitress at the bar.

It's the "normal guy out having a look" type quality to his books that make them a lot of fun to read.

(An exception to this life of easy travel might be the grueling hike he and Stephen Katz did in "A Walk in the Woods." But even there, what makes that book such a classic is the blatant "fish-out-of-water" quality these too have as they attempt to conquer the trail, and end up bickering with each other the whole time.)

When reading Bryson's books, I always feel kind of inspired to go out and have my own little adventures, and then write up something. (I took a lot of inspiration from him for my "Better Know a City" project, or at least the second wind I got on it two years ago, shortly after reading a couple of his books.)

However, comparing my own efforts to Bryson's, I'm reminded of what my Calvin English professors used to always stress: the kind of breezy conversation tone in good writers, which appears so effortless, is actually very difficult to write. It takes a lot of revision and hard work to achieve that casual tone.

How much work Bryson puts into his prose I don't know, but he has got the easy conversational tone down pat, making him a perfect guide for any sort of travel book.

I read this book on the plane on my way in to Australia, and it's been really neat the past few weeks to actually see in person the things Bryson talks about in the book.

...Although when one reads a travel book about an area one is visiting, I suppose one would just expect as a matter of course to see in person at least some of the things described in the book. So I don't know why it was a big deal to me whenever I saw some sort of landmark Bryson mentioned, but it was. Perhaps because Bryson is so famous, and perhaps because he's almost more of a humor writer than a travel writer, I was always like, "Hey, that's just what the famous guy was talking about in his book."

And although I have, as of this writing, yet to venture anywhere beyond walking distance from Melbourne University, I've already managed to see several little things that got passing references in this book.

And so, I was delighted when I saw Crown Casino, and realized it was the same Casino Bryson mentioned in his book.
And also when I saw a statue commemorating the tragic expedition of Burke and Wills, and realized I had read about this in Bryson's book.
I set off to see the "Immigration Museum" in Melbourne, precisely because Bryson had talked about it in this book.
And when I visited the Parliament building in Melbourne, I knew it had also once been a national capital because Bryson had mentioned it in his book.
And when an Australian friend pointed out to me the jail where Ned Kelly (W) was hanged, I knew the whole story from this book.
And the infamous Melbourne right turns--this book again filled me in, so the other day when some people were complaing about driving in Melbourne, I knew what everyone was complaining about.
And, the argument between Australian politicians Abbot and Costello (which Bryson has a laugh at in his book) is apparently still going on. Just saw an article about it in the Melbourne paper the other day (link).


And that brings up another good point about this book: it's one of those books that teaches you a lot of stuff without you even realizing it. You think you're just having fun reading about Bryson and his zany adventures, but without knowing it you suddenly develop a wealth of knowledge about Australia. Several times already since I started reading this book, someone has tried to tell me something about Australian culture, and I've found myself saying, "Yes, I already know that. It was in Bill Bryson's book."

One final note:
Bryson relates that some of the Australians he meets (particularly the ones on the Indian Pacific Railroad) have unfortunate attitudes about the Aboriginal people.
While living in Japan, I've also noticed that some of the older Australians can casually refer to the Aboriginals using terms that would be considered politically incorrect back in the United States.
But I should also say that among Australians my own age or younger, I've not observed this same attitude. In fact many younger Australians seem very sensitive to the Aboriginal issues.

I've also noticed in my brief time at the University of Melbourne that they will frequently begin large assemblies by acknowledging the Aboriginal tribes who originally owned the land the university is standing on.

I don't remember any assemblies back home begin by acknowledging the Native American tribes. Wouldn't be a bad idea though.

Addendum:
Here are some of my videos from Melbourne Australia HERE:



Link of the Day
Chomsky on Nicaragua - and international law

Down Under by Bill Bryson: Book Review (Scripted)

The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson

(Book Review)

Like "Me Talk Pretty One Day", this is another book I'm reading in preparation for graduate school in Applied Linguistics.
And, also like "Me Talk Pretty One Day", several people have told me this book has little to no carry over value into what I'm actually going to be studying. But because I'm stubborn, I read it through anyway.

I'm hoping that this book will at least get my mind thinking about language and it's complexities, and will help to ease me into the topic. And if not...well, it was a pleasant enough read, so no complaints about wasted time.

After belatedly discovering Bill Bryson, I've become a fan of his work, and have yet to find a book of his that isn't a pleasant read.
(For Bill Bryson past reviews, see:
A Walk in the Woods,
The Lost Continent,
and The Life and Times of Thunderbolt Kid .

And this book is no exception. Although the material it deals with might become dry in the hands of a lesser writer, Bryson manages to infuse with enough humor, wit, and interesting anecdotes to make this little book on the history of words more enjoyable than several novels I've read.

As the chapter headings indicate, this book covers a wide variety of topics. Everything from "The Dawn of Language" and "Where Words Come From" to "Swearing" and "Wordplay". This makes it somewhat hard to succinctly summarize, but you'll just have to take my word for it that there are plenty of fascinating tidbits of information contained within the pages.

Having spent almost the last 9 or so years teaching English as a foreign language, I've discovered through my own experience that many of the things we English speakers take for granted can present formidable challenges to speakers of other languages.
I've also discovered, through my struggles with the Japanese language, some of the differences between my own mother tongue and a foreign language.

Another theme of the book, the varieties of the English language, is something I also have some personal experience with, after interacting with the other English teachers in Japan, people from Britain, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Trinidad, and sometimes other countries.

For example, on page 177 Bryson writes, "'to be stuffed' is distinctly rude, so that if you say at a dinner party, 'I couldn't eat another thing; I'm stuffed," an embarrassing silence will fall over the table. (You may recognize the voice of experience in this.")
Indeed I myself once committed the exact same blunder -- as I wrote about in this post here.

Nevertheless, although parts of Bryson's books were telling me things I had already figured out, the vast majority of this book was new information for me.
The history of why we pronounce words differently than they are spelled I thought was pretty interesting.
The history of the English language was really interesting as well. (And again Bryson's skill as a writer makes this stuff especially interesting in his retelling.)

The chapter on swearing, which talked about when and how some words become taboo (but oddly enough not why) was also interesting. (And this is also a topic I've -touched on before in this blog).

Other notes:
***When Bryson mocks politicians for their ineloquence, he goes after George Bush senior, and not Junior. This struck me as a bit of an odd choice, until I looked at the copyright, and noticed this book was published in 1990.

***Page 17: "In Japanese, the word for foreigner means "stinking of foreign hair."
I've never heard that one before. Of course I don't claim to know every Japanese word ever uttered. It may well be a Japanese word for foreigner, but it is certainly not the Japanese word for foreigner. (The Japanese word for foreigner is a compound word reading "outside-person".)

Of course Bryson isn't a trained expert, he's just a good writer who did a lot of research for this book. This was one mistake I caught. Hopefully there aren't too many more.

***And one last thing I found fascinating. In his chapter on wordplay, Bryson talks about the French word game called called holorime (W), a two line poem in which each line is pronounced the same but uses different words. Bryson claims that in English we have the ability to do this in English, but for some reason we rarely do.

The recent Brittney Spear's song "If You Seek Amy" (W)strikes me as a brilliant modern day example of this.
I never thought I'd be praising a Brittney Spear's song, and I know she didn't write it herself, but whoever did write the song is certainly a lot more clever than I'll ever be.

(Although as this article points out (link here) they really just ripped it off from James Joyce who wrote:

If you see kay
Tell him he may
See you in tea
Tell him from me.

In the third line, Joyce manages to encode cunt as well. Take that, Britney )

Still original or not, it makes me angry that busy-body groups like "Parents Television Council" have nothing better to do than to harass radio stations which play this song (W).
I mean it's just silly. Anyone who has listened to the radio at all recently knows that there are any number of sexual explicit songs being played. The reason this song is being targeted is not because of the meaning, but because a number of years ago, for reasons no one can quite remember, certain people decided to make a sacred cow out of the "F-word" and now devote a lot of time and resources trying to keep it off the radio. To the point where they don't even want to allow it to be spelled. And to the point where they won't even allow the spelling of the word to be hinted at.

Really, guys, with all the problems out there in the world, this is what you're going to dedicate your energies on?

Link of the Day
Noam Chomsky - The New Order of World Government

The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson: Book Review (Scripted)

A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson

(Book Review)

Since I've been busy with school and work, I've not had a lot of free time for reading. But thankfully there's always time for audio books.

This is a book I should have read a long time ago. My aunt gave it to me for Christmas 10 years ago (wow, that long ago already!) after my friends and I had hiked the Smoky mountains during spring break. (Not hiking on the Appalachian trail per se, but intersecting it a couple of times on our route).

Around the same time, my best friend Brett read the same book. And I still remember him recounting some of the funnier parts of the book to me on one of our hiking trips. (With all the major things you forget over the years, it's strange some of the inane things you remember, isn't it?)

I didn't read this book at the time for a number of reasons. Back when I was 20, I was trying to make up for a childhood that consisted almost entirely of solitude and books by trying to be more social and making a conscious effort to limit the amount of books I read. (Sounds a bit silly now, but that was my attitude at the time). Also, partly because I'm a slow reader, it takes a tremendous amount of time and energy for me to get through a book. And so I rarely read a book simply on someone else's recommendation, and will only pick up a book unless I'm personally motivated to get through it.

I did however spend two different spring break trips during college hiking the Smoky mountains, and at points overlapping with the Appalachian trails. I posted my journal from second trips as a retrospection a few years ago. The first trip, from Sophomore year, was before I started my journal, which is a pity because we had much more adventures and interesting stories on that trip. At least I can still remember a lot of it even if I didn't write it down at the time.

...Anyway, both trips were among the best experiences of my life. I love hiking, and the only thing better than a good hike is being able to share it with some of your best friends and have a lot of laughs along the way. And the scenery was absolutely beautiful. Words can't describe the beauty of the Smoky mountains. At times the woods were so thick with foliage we thought we were in a rain forest.

And it ended up being quite an adventure as well. I've mentioned this before, but on our first trip the trail criss crossed the river at several points. We had of course noticed this while we were looking at the map, but didn't think anything of it. I guess we had just assumed there would be bridges at all of these points. Not being experienced hikers, we were shocked when we came to the first crossing and there wasn't a bridge in sight.

The first river crossing we were able to hop skip and jump across using some rocks. But, just like a video game, the crossings became progressively more and more difficult as we continued. Pretty soon we were having to make long detours in order to find a spot with rocks we could jump to. Then we had to shimmy across a fallen tree to get across. Finally we got to a large river where there didn't seem anyway to cross.

It was early March, and we were still wearing our winter coats, so it was much too cold to wade across the frigid mountain river (especially considering we didn't have any warm place to dry off in afterwards). So we walked up and down the river for a while looking for another place to cross. We argued and some people talked about going back. And in the end we ended up spending close to two hours making our own bridge: going into the forest and finding fallen trees and branches which we would then lug into the river and attempt to make foot paths between some of the bigger boulders. The four of us guys were trying to show off as much as possible for the girls in our group by making leaps of daring back and forth along the rocks (or maybe I'm just speaking for myself).

Finally when the bridge was completed, we helped the girls across. (Our bridges, such as they were, were a bit flimsily and wobbly and hard to walk across unassisted).

And then, one girl slipped off the bridge, falling in the cold water and even worse getting her back pack and all her gear soaking wet. We all rushed to help her.

That night, we got caught in a heavy snowfall. And the next day the adventure continued on...

You'll excuse me if I spend most of this review talking about my own experiences rather than the book. But reading this,( or listening to it rather), did bring back a lot of fond memories.

Anyway, now that a friend gave me a copy of this book on audio, and having recently finished and enjoyed two other Bill Bryson books (The Lost Continent and The Life and Times of Thunderbolt Kid ) it was the perfect time to continue onto this book.

And what can I say? Bill Bryson is a funny guy! I enjoyed this book thoroughly.

In addition to Bryson's dry wit, his hiking companion (under the alias of Stephen Katz) is a writer's dream.
In "The Life and Times of Thunderbolt Kid" Bryson recalls his childhood with Stephen Katz. And, although I've not read them, apparently Katz makes appearances in several of Bryson's other books. He's fat, grumpy, lazy, surly, vindictive and more or less the perfect comic character to write about on a long grueling hiking trip. When asked how he feels about bears, Katz responds, "Hey, they haven't gotten me yet!" When forced to share a lodge with a group of preppy spring break kids, Katz remarks, "One of these guys just called me Sport. I'm getting the fuck out of here!"

(In "The Thunderbolt Kid" Byrson mentions in passing that the real Stephen Katz called this book largely a work of fiction. Bryson never went on to elaborate the truth behind the charge, but it did have me wondering the whole time as I listened to this book. Either way, given how Katz comes off in this book, it's not surprising that the real Katz would have some objections).

Despite the fact that Katz is almost the perfect character, the thought did occur to me a few times: "I bet our gang would have had Katz and Bryson beat." If we had been taken notes on the trail, if we had written up the experience when it was still fresh, and if one of us had the wit and writing skill of Bryson, we could have made a much funnier book. Maybe that's arrogant to say, but when I remember all the funny things that happened to us, all the laughs we had, and all the insane arguments over pointless things, I bet our story would have been better. Bryson may have had Stephen Katz, but I had a whole host of characters on my trip.

....But the thing is, none of us did have the writing skills or subtle wit of Bryson. And that's the thing about writing: the actual story doesn't count half as much as the skill in telling it. If you go follow my links above to my journal entry about our trip, you'll note it's not exactly Shakespeare. Whereas Bryson can take something as mundane as a road trip across the Midwest, and make it into an hilarious book in "The Lost Continent."

Oh well. I guess writers like Bryson gives the rest of us something to shoot for.

In addition to adventures along the trail, Bryson also tells a lot of the history of the Appalachian trail (how it came into existence, and the problems it has faced over the years) and some of the geology and botany of the trail. I know this sounds boring, but it's actually a lot more interesting than you would think once Bryson starts getting into it.

Bryson also continues many of his observations about American life, including the lengths to which ordinary non-hiking Americans will go to avoid walking. Continuing on themes in some of his previous books, Bryson observes how difficult it is to walk across an American city even if you wanted to. Once off the trail, Bryson recounts a near death experience trying to walk to a local K-mart, and being honked at by the passing drivers for "having the temerity to try and cross town without the benefit of metal."

As I said in my review of "The Lost Continent", I couldn't agree more on this point. With the coming energy crisis, American cities are going to have to be redesigned to be more cycling and pedestrian friendly.

According to Wikipedia, a film adaptation of this book is in the works. I'd be interested to see that when it comes out.

Link of the Day
Chomsky Speaks: On Iraq, Iran and Norman Finkelstein
and The Republican Good News Fairy

A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson: Book Review (Scripted)

The Lost Continent by Bill Bryson

(Book Review)

Having thoroughly enjoyed the last Bill Bryson book I read, I thought I would move onto this book. (Plus a friend had it on audio book, and burned me a copy).

Bill Bryson left America while in college during the 1970s and spent most of his adult life living in Britain. This book is about him returning to America at the age of 36 to do some travelling around middle America and write about his experiences.

Needless to say, a lot has changed since Bryson's childhood. However the title of the book (along with some of the blurbs that go with it) is somewhat misleading, because it implies that the whole book is a lament for the lost America of Bryson's youth. Although that theme does pop up now and then, more than anything else this is just a travelogue. Bryson spends most of the time describing things like the tacky tourist traps he visits, the arguments he gets into with waitresses, and the annoying accents of people in the South.

A travelogue of mid-west America is a pretty boring subject, so it represents a challenge for the writer to make the material interesting. And if anyone is up to the challenge, it's Bryson. He's got a real acid pen, and he's not afraid to use it. If he thinks a certain town is a dump, or a certain tourist attraction is a rip off, he'll tell you in no uncertain terms. And once he gets into the deep South, he brings with him all of his Northern stereo-types and preconceptions. In short, he is not a writer at all worried about offending the people he's describing.

I'm not sure I would have had the patience to read this cover to cover as a paperback, but as an audio book I loved it. Bryson's wit and commentary are just the perfect kind of things to have on in the background while you're puttering around the apartment. In fact I found myself staying inside more, and making up more excuses to clean around the place just so I could continue listening.
(By the way, it turns out my copy is missing disc 8 out of 10 discs. Because this is a travelogue, and doesn't contain a continually evolving plot to keep track of, I didn't even notice this until my 3rd time listening through. I'm going to go ahead and review this book anyway, but if you want to make a note that I missed a couple chapters and thus take this review with a grain of salt, go ahead).

Michigan makes a brief appearance in this trip. Bryson talks about the horrors of Detroit. Greenfield village (which I remember visiting on a family vacation once) gets a nice write-up. Grand Rapids only gets named dropped (as in "I drove past Grand Rapids") which is a shame because I'm sure it would have been funny to get Bryson's take on it. And then Bryson spends some time up North in places like Traverse City and Mackinaw Island (places I remember from family vacations and Church youth group Bike trips).

Parts of this book sounded vaguely familiar, and I think the part on high way billboard signs in particular might have been part of a book of essays I had to read in high school. Since this book was first published way back in 1988, it's entirely possible it could have been showing up in model essay composition books by the time I was in 11th grade or so.

Listening to the book I would occasionally forget that it was 20 years old. For example Bryson spends a lot of time complaining about how stupid and politically apathetic college kids today are, but those kids he's talking about are all around 40 now.
(As someone who was still in elementary school in the 80s, I don't have a good idea of what the college scene was like then. But it does seem that many people like to harp on how shallow and apathetic the 80s generation was. On the other hand, I remember reading Howard Zinn once saying that contrary to popular belief, many of his students in the 80s were passionate about political causes).

As someone who has spent most of his adult life living abroad, I identified with much of Bryson's experience of returning home and looking at your own country through new eyes. And when Bryson talks about aging and the crisises of mid-life, I was shocked to realize he was at the time of writing not all that much older than me. (Okay, at 36 he's got a good 7 years on me now, but the way time's been flying by I'm sure I'll be coming to that bend before I know it).

It is interesting to think how much America had changed since Bryson was a child in the 1950s. I compared my own experience and thought if I were to go back to America now and do a travelogue, would things have changed all that much since my childhood. Of course now we have cellphones, DVDs, internet and facebook, but I think in terms of the structure of the cities and roads things are more or less the same.

In Bryson's case, he noted how the town centers have disappeared and everything is replaced by suburban shopping malls and driving culture.
As someone who lived several years in Britain, he was particularly surprised when he tried to walk through town how all the parking lots were separated by concrete barriers, and to get from one to the other you were supposed to get in your car and drive the short distance. He describes the weird stares people gave him when he climbed over the concrete barrier and walked across to another parking lot.

This is something we are so used to in America we don't often think about it, but it really is an unhealthy oddity of our culture. Anyone who has tried to walk down 28th street can attest that it is not very pedestrian friendly. And cyclists take their own life into their hands when attempting these roads. And have you ever tried to walk to into a mall? I remember once trying to walk to Grandville mall several years ago, and finding the whole thing was built like a fortress against pedestrians.

As global warming, the energy crisis, and peak oil become more and more of a problem, I think we are going to have to seriously think about redesigning American cities so people at least have the option of walking or biking if they want to.

And finally, listening to how Bill Bryson was able to come up with funny stories and witty commentary about even the most boring cities in small town America, I have become re-inspired with my "better know a city project". I don't think I'll ever reach Bryson's level, but at least I have a new standard to aim for in my own travelogues.
It is a cruel irony that I'm becoming re-inspired with this project just as I no longer have the time to do it (see previous post) but I hope to get in a couple more travelogues before school starts. And there's always summer break.

Link of the Day
Great satire from "This Modern World"
5 Years Later Neo-cons discuss their Regrets,
and Remember when they told us the war would pay for itself?

The Lost Continent by Bill Bryson: Book Review (Scripted)

The Life and Times of Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson

(Book Review)

I was at a friend's apartment and this book was just lying on the floor. (Most of the Bill Bryson books I read I tend to read because someone else left it lying on the floor.) I flipped through it and it looked kind of interesting, so I asked to borrow it.

"Go ahead," my friend said. "I think you'll enjoy it. That's the only book I remember laughing out loud while I was reading."

This book is Bill Bryson's memoir of growing up during the 1950s.

By the way, strange, isn't it, how even those of us who were born 20 years after the 1950s still feel a kind of nostalgia for the decade? Is it because of some sort of Jungian collective unconscious? Or is it because modern American conservatism has created a mythology in which we are told that the 1950s is some sort of golden age that we must always be trying to return to?

At least in my case (and maybe this holds true for some of you as well) I was not allowed to watch regular TV until I was well into my teens, and so grew up watching re-runs of "The Mickey Mouse Club", "Davy Crockett" "Zorro" and other old shows on the Disney channel, and then once I got a little bit older I graduated to Nick at Night reruns. As far as my TV viewing habits went, I might as well have grown up in the 50s.

(One last thought on the subject: if Japanese movies like "Always" are any indication, the feeling of collective nostalgia for the 1950s is not a phenomenon limited to North America).

In this book Bryson takes us through the decade we all feel like we sort of remember anyway. And there's no better guide than Bill Bryson. I don't read a lot of Bryson (none since I started up this book review project) but every time I do read him I find myself wondering why I don't read more. He's a funny guy. Like my friend, I also found myself laughing out loud several times throughout this book (much to Shoko's annoyance).

(I exaggerate not, by the way, the funniness of this book. Go to the review section at amazon.com and see if you can count how many people claim this book literally made them laugh out loud.)

It is definitely easy to romanticize the 50s as the last decade when kids were allowed to be kids. When you could roam all over the neighborhood and ride your bike everywhere without anyone worrying over your safety. When children actually went outside to play instead of being stuck inside with cable TV, DVD players, myspace and the internet.

"The most striking difference between then and now was how many kids there were then. America had thirty-two million children aged twelve or under in the mid 1950s, and four million babies were plopping onto the changing mats every year. So there were kids everywhere, all the time, in densities now unimaginable, but especially whenever anything interesting or unusual happened...
...The other difference from those days was that kids were always outdoors--I knew kids who were pushed out the back door at eight in the morning and not allowed back in until five unless they were on fire or actively bleeding--and they were always looking for something to do. If you stood on any corner with a bike--any corner anywhere--over a hundred children, many of whom you had never seen before, would appear and ask you where you were going."

What a difference between now and then. Growing up in the suburbs in the 1980s the houses were so far apart you hardly knew anyone, and my mother was so terrified of cars speeding by we weren't allowed out to go out of our own yard until 3rd grade. I didn't even know most of the kids on my street (this was partly because we were sent to private schools). And, as Bryson notes during the end of the book, these days no one is outside.

Other parts of the book though are timeless and not related only to the 1950s but to childhood in general. Such as Bryson's description of how time passes:
"One of the great myths of life is that childhood passes quickly. In fact, because time moves more slowly in Kid World--five times more slowly in a classroom on a hot afternoon, eight times more slowly on any car journey of over fives miles (rising to eighty-six times more slowly when driving across Nebraska or Pennsylvania lengthwise), and so slowly during the last week before birthdays, Christmases and summer vacations as to be functionally immeasurable--it goes on for decades when measured in adult terms. It is adult life that is over in a twinkling."
So true.

Many other universal truths of childhood life, no matter what the decade, are also found within the pages. Bryson's all too true description of trying to go to the bathroom while bundled up in winter clothing had me laughing out loud in the middle of the shopping mall.

Typical of Bryson, he manages to mix in some serious points along with the humor. He has an excellent chapter dealing with the dark sides of the 50s, the racism, the anti-communist hysteria, the love of nuclear bombs, and the CIA assisted Coup in Guatemala. All of which he does an excellent job retelling and all of which should be read by every American. (The Guatemala episode especially has a tendency to disappear down the memory hole these days).

In fact, because so many people seem to be unaware of this episode in American history, perhaps it's worth taking the time to quote it at length here:

"In 1950, Guatemala elected a reformist government--'the most democratic Guatemala ever had', according to the historian Howard Zinn--under Jacobo Arbenz, an educated landowner of good intentions. Arbenz's election was a blow for the American company United Fruit, which had run Guatemala as a private fiefdom since the nineteenth century. The company owned nearly everything of importance in the country--the ports, the railways, the communications networks, banks, stores, and some 550,000 acres of farmland--paid little taxes and could count confidently on the support of a string of repressive dictators.

Some 85 per cent of United Fruit's land was left more or less permanently idle. This kept fruit prices high, but Guatemalans poor. Arbenz, who was the son of Swiss immigrants and something of an idealist, thought this was unfair and decided to remake the country along more democratic lines. He established free elections, ended racial discrimination, encouraged a free press, introduced a forty-hour week, legalized unions and ended government corruption.

Needless to say, most people loved him. In an attempt to reduce poverty, he devised a plan to nationalize, at a fair price, much of the idle farmland--including 1,700 acres of his own--and redistribute it in the form of smallholdings to a hundred thousand landless peasants. To that end Arbenz's government expropriated 400,000 acres of land from United Fruit, and offered as compensation the sum the company had claimed the land was worth for tax purposes--$1,185,000.

United Fruit now decided the land was worth $16 million actually--a sum the Guatemalan government couldn't afford to pay. When Arbenz turned down United Fruit's demand for the higher level of compensation, the company complained to the United States government, which responded by underwriting a coup.

Arbenz fled his homeland in 1954 and a new, more compliant leader named Carlos Castillo was installed. To help him on his way, the CIA gave him a list of seventy thousand 'questionable individuals'--teachers, doctors, government employees, union organizers, priests--who had supported the reforms in the belief that democracy in Guatemala was a good thing. Thousands of them were never seen again."

Link of the Day
What's Really Happened During the Surge?

The Life and Times of Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson: Book Review (Scripted)