The Lost Continent author Bill Bryson. Free mobile The 262 Lost XSKEHsdSBJ Continent xTDyTG8zFXjZx. The Lost Continent by Bill Bryson, 1991, Abacus edition, Paperback.

THE LOST CONTINENT Travels in Small-Town America. By Bill Bryson. New York: Harper & Row. It is not uncommon for Americans with a literary bent to expatriate themselves to England and then follow the model of T. Eliot or Henry James. Katherine Jenkins Calon Lan Download.

Contentedly Anglified, they don't really look to go home again. A modern exemplar of this same tendency would be the inveterate traveler Paul Theroux, who, so far, anyway, seems to spend most of his time outside his native land. However, Bill Bryson, an Iowa native turned London journalist, who in this book gives us the results of a 13,978-mile ramble around the United States, has picked up the Theroux torch, at least when it comes to crabbiness. Inspired by a fit of trans-Atlantic nostalgia to go out and 'look for America,' Mr. Bryson slogs from state to state (38 in all), rarely being anything other than glumly disappointed by what he finds. Either Eliot and James had the right idea, or else Jack Kerouac, Simon and Garfunkel and William Least Heat Moon have a lot to answer for. Here's a mini-version of our author's itinerary: The Mississippi River is 'flat and dull' and, a bit later, 'still strangely unimpressive.'

' 'Missouri looked precisely the same as Illinois, which had looked precisely the same as Iowa.' ' Interstate 55: 'It was boring, too.' ' In Cairo, Ill. (pronounced KAY-ro, eliciting a sneer), he can't understand 'why any citizen of a free country would choose to live in such a dump.' ' When it comes to Civil War battlefields, Mr.

Bryson's considered opinion is that there's 'nothing much to distinguish this stretch of empty fields from that one.' ' Long before this juncture, however, one has been yearning to shriek into his ear, 'For heaven's sake, use your imagination!' ' as all of our earnest social studies teachers used to - now, there's nostalgia for you. Eventually, since Mr. Bryson, despite his continual state of pique, seems to be a clever, amusing and likable fellow, one has to ponder whether these are heretofore unsayable truths with which he's confronting us.

Do each of us secretly wonder in New England, as he does, 'Was that really all there was to Connecticut?' ' This hasn't been my experience, but neither do I consider lower New Hampshire to be simply 'modern commercial squalor,' Maine towns 'messy and drear' or Lake Erie 'a large toilet.' ' A relentless if wholly uninventive complainer, Mr.

Smith And Wesson Model 915 Manually here. Bryson doesn't seem to know that it's simply too easy, too vieux jeu, to curl one's lip reflexively at the Mark Twain Drive-In Restaurant and Dinette in Hannibal, Mo., or to denounce 'overweight tourists in boisterous clothes.' ' Just because they don't have book contracts is no reason to make fun of them; after all, they do seem to be frequenting the same spots as the admittedly also somewhat hefty Mr.

While I'm sure he believes he himself is clothed in a protective cloak of irony, what he's wearing is a veil of sarcasm - and it, I'm afraid, quickly wears thin. Now, it's possible that, post-Jane Stern and Michael Stern ('Roadfood,' 'Square Meals'), we're into the next stage of American travel, speeding past the retro chic of roadside kitsch into an era where if you don't think obscure greasy spoons are worth a detour, you can come right out and say so - even be proud of it. Though I personally enjoy K-Marts (emporia Mr. Bryson terms uniformly 'depressing') I don't pretend to be fashion's Madame Vionnet. However, it heartens me that, even as he insists on using Anglicisms such as 'tweely,' he and I can agree on a 'bring back Burma Shave signs' campaign, and that he loves, as I do, a good Ripley's Believe It or Not Museum. Heading westward with a brief stop in his hometown of Des Moines - where his mother will offer her lifelong panacea: 'Can I get you a sandwich, honey?'

Bryson proceeds to find Nebraska 'the most unexciting of all the states,' Colorado 'flat and brown and full of remote little towns with charmless names' and Yosemite 'a letdown of monumental proportions.' ' Speaking of charmless, would that he could hear himself! This is the man whose taste in fictional towns and villages runs strictly to the sophomoric and scatological: 'Colostomy, Montana,' for example, or 'Draino, Indiana,' or 'Lake Maggot State Park.'

' This is the man who, having just dubbed, for anecdote's sake, a former teacher of his 'Miss Mucus,' has the temerity to mock a Wyoming Shriners group he observes for their not properly sophisticated 'idea of advanced wit.' ' Unlike Ian Frazier, whose curiosity marches in tandem with his imagination and whose splendid book 'Great Plains' offers fewer states but almost twice the mileage, Mr. Bryson stops to ask very few questions, so his sense of wonder is as dead as a frozen battery.

It's unfortunate, but once the joyless tone of 'The Lost Continent' is set, one has the sensation of being the sort of hitchhiker found usually in the Twilight Zone - locked in a car with a boor at the wheel and the radio tuned to static.