I’m a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After 20 Years Away
Where to buy I’m a Weirder Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After 20 Years Away books online?
- ISBN13: 9780767903820
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
After living in Britain for two decades, Bill Bryson recently stirred back to the United States with his English wife and four children (he had read somewhere that nearly 3 million Americans believed they had been abducted by aliens–as he later place it, “it was clear my people needed me”). They were greeted by a new and improved America that boasts microwave pancakes, twenty-four-hour dental-floss hotlines, and the staunch conviction that ice is not a luxury item.
Delivering the brilliant comic musings that are a Bryson hallmark, I’m a Weirder Here Myself recounts his sometimes disconcerting reunion with the land of his birth. The result is a book filled with hysterical scenes of one man’s attempt to reacquaint himself with his own country, but it is also an extended if at times bemused like letter to the homeland he has returned to after twenty years away.
Amazon.com Review
In the world of contemporary travel writing, Bill Bryson, the bestselling leader of A Walk in the Woods, regularly emerges as a major contender for King of Crankiness. Granted, he complains well and humorously, but between every line of his travel books you can nearly hear the harsh echo: “I wanna go home, I miss my wife.”
Happily, I’m a Weirder Here Myself unleashes a new Bryson, more contemplative and less likely to toss daggers. After two decades in England, he’s relocated to Hanover, New Hampshire. In this collection (drawn from dispatches for London’s Night & Day magazine), he’s writing from home, in close proximity to wife and family tree. We find a pleased marriage between humor and reflection as he assesses life both in New England and in the contemporary United States. With the telescopic perspective of one who’s stepped out of the American mainstream and come back after 20 years, Bryson aptly holds the mirror up to U.S. culture, capturing its absurdities–such as hotlines for dental floss, the cult of the lawsuit, and weird American injuries such as persons sustained from pillows and beds. “In the time it takes you to read this,” he writes, “four of my fellow citizens will somehow manage to be wounded by their bedding.”
The book also reflects the sweet side of tiny-town USA, with columns about post-office parties, dining at diners, and Prayer–when the only goal is to “get your stomach into the approximate shape of a beach ball” and be grateful. And grateful we are that the previously peripatetic Bryson has returned to the U.S., turning his eye to this land–while living at home and near his wife. Under her kindly influence, he entertains through thoughtful insights, not sarcastic stabs. –Melissa Rossi
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I’ve never establish Bryson as amusing as my British friends do, but this book is his worst yet. The “humor” felt contrived and his experiences were obviously exaggerated, if not made up from whole cloth. I heard Bryson on PBS awhile back, with his phoney accent and fawning manner in full flow. Bryson is that most loathesome of creatures: the sycophantic, Anglophilic American. I reflect Mr.”I’ve permanently wanted to be a European” Bryson should pack it back to Yorkshire, where his Uncle Tom act is undoubtedly more appreciated.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
I am in the process of reading all of Mr Brysons books but I was taken back by the unfriendly way he discribed America in this book.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
Introduced to Bryson with “Neither Here Nor There” and “Made in America,” I used to be his no. 1 fan. His wit became a bit missing with his stamina in “A Walk in the Woods,” and he’s just godawful with his latest effort. Granted, his audience with these missives are some of the palest creatures ever made, persons Brits who make their minds up about America in an off-season weeklong trip to Miami Beach. Bill used to be wonderful; to get him back to his ancient self, his publisher should drop him in the middle of nowhere and let him write his way out. Enough about junk mail and American supermarkets.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
Bill Bryson, I’m a Weirder Here Myself (Broadway Books, 1999)
At funtrivia.com, one of the (many) ways a quiz can go from a relatively high status to “very poor” between the time I start and the time I end is a factual error that causes me to get a question incorrect. Research is a gorgeous thing.
Half of me is willing to give Bill Bryson the benefit of the doubt; the additional half is ready to excoriate him on what may be a fake impression. I’ll attempt to keep it modest.
Bryson’s column “The Waste Generation,” about two-thirds of the way through I’m a Weirder Here Myself, starts off with a statistic that’s reasonably simply incorrect (“One of the most arresting statistics I have seen in a excellent while is that 5 percent of all the energy used in the United States is consumed by computers that have been left on all night.” Incorrect; a computer and a monitor, left on twenty-four hours a day, together consume approximately a dollar’s worth of electricity per month. The computer is one of the most energy-well-organized machines on the planet today). The American home computer revolution happened while Bryson was out of the country, so I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. It would have been nice, but, had he mentioned his source.
A forgivable error, perhaps, though basing a whole column on it is rather disturbing. But the part of the column that bugs me is farther down: “I have glanced out hotel room windows late at night, in a variety of cities, and been struck by the fact that lots of lights in lots of office buildings are still burning… why don’t we turn these things off?… Why, after all, go through the irksome annoyance of waiting twenty seconds for your computer to warm up each morning when you can have it at your immediate beck by leaving it on all night?”
Two different questions with two entirely different answers, but Bryson goes on to turn it into a discussion of American wastefulness with its natural resources. He may be reaching the right conclusion, but if so, he’s doing a 180 from where he ongoing. To answer the latter question first, in modern computers with the Energy Saver features (which do nothing of the sort) turned off, it takes less power to place a computer on all night than it does to shut it down and start it up. (To take up another point he makes in the same passage, it’s also more well-organized to place cars running for fleeting periods rather than turning them off and back on. Any electrical appliance requires something of an electrical security deposit to get ongoing, just like an apartment renter has to place down “amount of monthly rent times three” or somesuch in order to go in.) The ex- answer takes longer, but the fleeting answer is that the Federal government, during the 1974 oil crisis, was taking out full-page ads in various magazines (I used to see them on a regular basis in Time) telling us that leaving lights on all night in buildings is what we SHOULD do, because electric lights give off heat, and at the time it was cheaper to heat a building by leaving its lights on and cranking the gas heat down six degrees or so. That situation went away with the end of the fuel crisis, of course, but the government never took persons ads out in time.
Here’s where I get a small wonky with Bryson. The subtitle of the book is “Notes on returning to America aftetr twenty years away.” If the number is, in fact, twenty, then Bryson was in the country when the Government was running persons full-page ads. And thus, agreed that he’s all too well aware of the average Joe’s lack of common sense, he could have come to the same conclusion by poking fun at the fact that the average Joe never stopped leaving the lights on all night after the fuel crisis was over. But he doesn’t.
Humor is a wonderful thing (and let me hasten to say that there is a excellent deal of it here), but one of the requisites for humor of any sort should be that’s it’s based on fact. The humorist is, in many cases (and certainly in this one) using humor to get a point across, and doing so with factual errors leaves a very terrible taste in my mouth. Factual errors by ignorance place less of a terrible taste in my mouth than factual errors by design. That’s what I see in this essay, and it makes me marvel how many others, with circumstances with which I’m less acquainted in this book, are founded on the same sleight of hand. Perhaps one error shouldn’t taint my view of a whole book, but I can’t help it. After all, when an practiced witness admits he falsified one fact in one examination that changed the outcome, how regularly do you reflect he’ll be getting called to testify after that?
I try to give Bryson the benefit of the doubt for most of it, because his heart’s mostly in the right place, and his brand of humor is the understated, simple kind that resides at the top of the humor heap. But I’ll never be able to read another word of Bryson’s lacking the 1974 energy crisis in the back of my head. ** 1/2
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
I hiked a part of the Appalachian Trail; therefore I’ve read Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods. (I didn’t meet a soul on the AT who hadn’t.) There is no disputing, Mr. Bryson is a humorous and gifted writer, so I bought I’m a Weirder Here Myself.
Sorry to say, every discriminating reader of Mr. Bryson’s works will quickly realize that Mr. Bryson is also a Liberal. And like many Liberal authors, he just can’t help himself. His writing is laced with tiresome liberal commentary and snide comments aimed at conservative icons (the much loved President Reagan) and traditions. He is also a right believer in the theory of evolution so we get these authoritative descriptions of how things started when none of it can possibly be proved. One also gleans that he’s been snookered by the ubiquitous global warming propoganda. Further, he is mystified by the American’s attachment to his guns. It would be reasonable to summarize Mr. Bryson’s book content by adage that Mr. Bryson’s worldview is an almalgam of every extant Liberal cliche.
There were times when I wished he had stayed in England to save America from yet another destructive Liberal elitist sneering down his nose at we deplorable, uncouth Americans. We have enough of these fools here already.
Liberal authors along with actors in Hollywood just don’t get it: it is safe to assume that more than 50% of your audience aren’t liberal; hence, place the political proselytizing for political forums and please just entertain us.
There were really moments in I’m a Weirder Here Myself where I marvelled at Mr. Bryson’s flagrant ignorance. He has got to be joking, I thought. Yet, if not ignorance, then what? Could he be willingly promoting the disreputable agenda of rewriting American history to expunge all references to God? Say it isn’t so! Example: Mr. Bryson claims with a straight face that Prayer came about when the pilgrims thanked the Indians. I kid you not. What falacious hogwash! I had to bark a laugh of astonished derision.
But aside from the content of his books, Mr. Bryson is truly a talented compiler of sytax. He’s just not that deep of a thinker or a thorough fact checker.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5