The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America Book

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 colourful 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?Read More

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  • Amazon

    An account of one man's rediscovery of America and his search for the perfect small town. Instead he finds a continent that is doubly lost: lost to itself because it is blighted by greed, pollution, mobile homes and television; and lost to him because he has become a foreigner in his own country.

  • Play

    I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to'. And as soon as Bill Bryson was old enough he left. Des Moines couldn't hold him but it did lure him back. After ten years in England he returned to the land of his youth and drove almost 14 000 miles in search of a mythical small town called Amalgam the kind of trim and sunny place where the films of his youth were set. Instead his search led him to Anywhere USA; a lookalike strip of gas stations motels and hamburger outlets populated by lookalike people with a penchant for synthetic fibres. Travelling around thirty-eight of the lower states - united only in their mind-numbingly dreary uniformity - he discovered a continent that was doubly lost; lost to itself because blighted by greed pollution mobile homes and television; lost to him because he had become a stranger in his own land. The Lost Continent is a classic of travel literature - hilariously stomach-achingly funny yet tinged with heartache - and the book that first staked Bill Bryson's claim as the most beloved writer of his generation.

  • Blackwell

    Presents a travel literature. I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to'. And, as soon as Bill Bryson was old enough, he left. Des Moines couldn't hold him, but it did lure him back. After ten years in England, he returned to the land of his youth...

  • 0552998087
  • 9780552998086
  • Bill Bryson
  • 2 January 1999
  • Black Swan
  • Paperback (Book)
  • 349
  • New edition
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