Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6645 in Books
• Published on: 2007-06-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 416 pages

New York Times
'Outlandishly and improbably entertaining...inevitably [I] would
be reduced to body-racking, tear-inducing, de-couching laughter.'

Literary Review
'Always witty and sometimes hilarious…wonderfully funny and
touching.'

Daily Mail
'A funny, effortlessly readable, quietly enchanted memoir...Bryson
also provides a quirky social history of America.'

Customer Reviews

Brilliant from start to finish
I have read all of Bryson's books and found this one as funny and interesting as all those that came before. In this book he has managed to capture in words those things that all of us felt at sometime during our childhood. Add into the mix a small dose of American history and you have a book that is both funny, insightful, and somewhat educational. I recommed this to all--it is vintage Bryson. Also, his old friend Katz makes an appearance. What can be better than that?!

A FIVE STAR SALUTE TO THE MASTER
Bill Bryson, the man who, had he been alive at the time, would have teased an open-throated guffaw out of Mona Lisa, is back on the Hopeless Laughter Trail with this memoir of growing up in Iowa in the '50s and'60s. Indeed, it may be his funniest book yet, but, as always with Bryson, it's more than just a chuckle fest: it's a warm, wise, poignant evocation of a nation long since vanished up its own fundament. The past is a foreign country; they did things differently there, and on a more humane scale.
A book to be treasured, to be read and then re-read, by a writer without equal.

Bryson at his best
I'm one of those lucky people that read something really funny on a train, or any public place, and supress my emption. I'm also one of those lucky people (of which there must be millions) that rush to buy Bill Bryson's new book on release day. This book is one of the few books that have ever made me laugh, and I really mean laugh, out loud. It's written with humour and warmth and portrays a world that has long disappeared, which is clearly a sad thing. A fantastic book - shame it wasn't twice as long I enjoyed it so much!