|
|
I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After 20 Years Away (Paperback)
by Bill Bryson
| Category:
Travel, Travel writing, Fiction |
| Market price: ¥ 168.00
MSL price:
¥ 158.00
[ Shop incentives ]
|
| Stock:
Pre-order item, lead time 3-7 weeks upon payment [ COD term does not apply to pre-order items ] |
MSL rating:
 Good for Gifts |
| MSL Pointer Review:
Poignant, funny, true, sometimes making you laugh out loud, this book provides a wonderful look at American idiosyncrasies. |
| If you want us to help you with the right titles you're looking for, or to make reading recommendations based on your needs, please contact our consultants. |
Detail |
Author |
Description |
Excerpt |
Reviews |
|
|
|
Author: Bill Bryson
Publisher: Broadway; Reprint edition
Pub. in: June, 2000
ISBN: 076790382X
Pages: 304
Measurements: 8 x 5.3 x 0.7 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00585
Other information:
|
|
Rate this product:
|
|
- Awards & Credential -
The National Bestseller (in North America) |
|
- MSL Picks -
I'm a Stranger Here Myself is a collection of columns by Bill Bryson printed in England for an English audience. Most of them are amusing anecdotes on life in America, and especially wistful recalling of life in America as he knew it twenty years ago contrasted with the present day. In his world, the present generally is inferior, though there is quite a bit of self doubting in his opinion pieces (notably especially when discussing motels and drive-in movies) and occasionally praise for modernity (look hard.)
When he sticks to wry commentary on humorous topics (the IRS, computers, customer service, etc.) he is hilarious; kind of a more urbane Dave Barry. I was on a few occasions irritated with the book, and each time it was on one of two topics: air travel or immigration. He has nothing good to say about traveling by plane (and sometimes I would agree with him), and he goes to great lengths, for instance, to complain that he arrived at an airport with no photo ID, and had difficulty getting on the plane. (Who travels by plane without a photo ID?) In fact on several occasions he blames others for misfortunes caused patently by his own (frequently admitted) ineptness, ignorance, or forgetfulness. I find it perfectly reasonable that if you show up for a flight with no photo ID, that you don't get on the plane. He took the attitude that the security forces were inept, loser idiots who should have known who he was, and clearly should have made an exception for him, a celebrity. He goes as far as to contrast this to the UK where he relates a tale of a customs agent telling him to lie to get into the country and praising him for his efficiency. This truly rubbed me the wrong way, and I hope he would not have been so foolish to write that after 9/11. He is also goes off on a rant against people opposed to immigration in the US, saying that so little of the country is built up that we should, essentially, let anyone that wants to come in feel welcome. Mind you, this is the same guy who, just a few pages away who laments how built up the country is getting and how terrible it is. Nobody noticed this seeming contradictory position during editing, for some reason. He also thinks that it is unreasonable to deny benefits to illegal aliens, ignoring that in the state of Arizona alone, the cost of medical care for illegals is almost $1 Billion (of US taxpayer dollars) annually, and that in the Southwest an enormously disproportionate amount of crime is the work of illegals. I realize his wife is English, and I appreciate his toils to get her into the country legally, but to impugn that anyone opposed to illegal immigration is a cretin, is ignorant at best and insulting at worst. Hey, Bill, one more time: unlike your wife, the vast majority of immigration foes are talking about people here illegally!
Having said that, overall I liked the book, and will almost certainly buy more Bryson books. Some of the gems are truly worth reading and re-reading, particularly the address he gave to a high school graduation. I think it's worth four stars, and it would have been worth five easily if it wasn't for some of the pompous self-righteousness in a couple of the chapters. Read it and decide for yourself.
For Chinese English learners, almost all Bryson’s books are perfect reading materials, I’m A Stranger Here Myself is no exception. (From quoting Robert Hedges, USA)
Target readers:
Broadway; Reprint edition
|
|
Customers who bought this product also bought:
|
|
Bill Bryson was born in Des Moines, Iowa. For twenty years he lived in England, where he worked for the Times and the Independent, and wrote for most major British and American publications. His books include travel memoirs (Neither Here Nor There; The Lost Continent; Notes from a Small Island) and books on language (The Mother Tongue; Made in America). His account of his attempts to walk the Appalachian Trail, A Walk in the Woods, was a huge New York Times bestseller. He lives in Hanover, New Hampshire, with his wife and his four children.
|
|
From the Publisher:
After living in Britain for two decades, Bill Bryson recently moved 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 put 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 Stranger 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 love letter to the homeland he has returned to after twenty years away.
|
Mail Call
One of the pleasures of living in a small, old-fashioned New England town is that it generally includes a small, old-fashioned post office. Ours is particularly agreeable. It's in an attractive Federal-style brick building, confident but not flashy, that looks like a post office ought to. It even smells nice - a combination of gum adhesive and old central heating turned up a little too high.
The counter employees are always cheerful, helpful and efficient, and pleased to give you an extra piece of tape if it looks as if your envelope flap might peel open. Moreover, post offices here by and large deal only with postal matters. They don't concern themselves with pension payments, car tax, TV licenses, lottery tickets, savings accounts, or any of the hundred and one other things that make a visit to any British post office such a popular, all-day event and provide a fulfilling and reliable diversion for chatty people who enjoy nothing so much as a good long hunt in their purses and handbags for exact change. Here there are never any long lines and you are in and out in minutes.
Best of all, once a year every American post office has a Customer Appreciation Day. Ours was yesterday. I had never heard of this engaging custom, but I was taken with it immediately. The employees had hung up banners, put out a long table with a nice checkered cloth, and laid on a generous spread of doughnuts, pastries, and hot coffee - all of it free.
After twenty years in Britain, this seemed a delightfully improbable notion, the idea of a faceless government bureaucracy thanking me and my fellow townspeople for our patronage, but I was impressed and grateful - and, I must say, it was good to be reminded that postal employees are not just mindless automatons who spend their days mangling letters and whimsically sending my royalty checks to a guy in Vermont named Bill Bubba but rather are dedicated, highly trained individuals who spend their days mangling letters and sending my royalty checks to a guy in Vermont named Bill Bubba.
Anyway, I was won over utterly. Now I would hate for you to think that my loyalty with respect to postal delivery systems can be cheaply bought with a chocolate twirl doughnut and a Styrofoam cup of coffee, but in fact it can. Much as I admire Britain's Royal Mail, it has never once offered me a morning snack, so I have to tell you that as I strolled home from my errand, wiping crumbs from my face, my thoughts toward American life in general and the U.S. Postal Service in particular were pretty incomparably favorable.
But, as nearly always with government services, it couldn't last. When I got home, the day's mail was on the mat. There among the usual copious invitations to acquire new credit cards, save a rain forest, become a life member of the National Incontinence Foundation, add my name (for a small fee) to the Who's Who of People Named Bill in New England, help the National Rifle Association with its Arm-a-Toddler campaign, and the scores of other unsought inducements, special offers, and solicitations that arrive each day at every American home - well, there among this mass was a forlorn and mangled letter that I had sent forty-one days earlier to a friend in California care of his place of employment and that was now being returned to me marked "Insufficient Address - Get Real and Try Again" or words to that effect.
At the sight of this I issued a small, despairing sigh, and not merely because I had just sold the U.S. Postal Service my soul for a doughnut. It happens that I had recently read an article on wordplay in the Smithsonian magazine in which the author asserted that some puckish soul had once sent a letter addressed, with playful ambiguity, to
HILL
JOHN
MASS
and it had gotten there after the postal authorities had worked out that it was to be read as "John Underhill, Andover, Mass." (Get it?)
It's a nice story, and I would truly like to believe it, but the fate of my letter to California seemed to suggest a need for caution with regard to the postal service and its sleuthing abilities. The problem with my letter was that I had addressed it to my friend merely "c/o Black Oak Books, Berkeley, California," without a street name or number because I didn't know either. I appreciate that that is not a complete address, but it is a lot more explicit than "Hill John Mass" and anyway Black Oak Books is a Berkeley institution. Anyone who knows the city - and I had assumed in my quaintly naive way that that would include Berkeley postal authorities - would know Black Oak Books. But evidently not. (Goodness knows, incidentally, what my letter had been doing in California for nearly six weeks, though it came back with a nice tan and an urge to get in touch with its inner feelings.)
Now just to give this plaintive tale a little heartwarming perspective, let me tell you that not long before I departed from England, the Royal Mail had brought me, within forty-eight hours of its posting in London, a letter addressed to "Bill Bryson, Writer, Yorkshire Dales," which is a pretty impressive bit of sleuthing. (And never mind that the correspondent was a trifle off his head.)
So here I am, my affections torn between a postal service that never feeds me but can tackle a challenge and one that gives me free tape and prompt service but won't help me out when I can't remember a street name. The lesson to draw from this, of course, is that when you move from one country to another you have to accept that there are some things that are better and some things that are worse, and there is nothing you can do about it. That may not be the profoundest of insights to take away from a morning's outing, but I did get a free doughnut as well, so on balance I guess I'm happy.
Now if you will excuse me I have to drive to Vermont and collect some mail from a Mr. Bubba.
(Some months after this piece was written, I received a letter from England addressed to "Mr. Bill Bryson, Author of 'A Walk in the Woods,' Lives Somewhere in New Hampshire, America." It arrived without comment or emendation just five days after it was mailed. My congratulations to the U.S. Postal Service for an unassailable triumph.)
|
|
| View all 18 comments |
The New York Times Book Review (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-31 00:00>
Bryson is] great company from the start...equal parts Garrison Keillor, Michael Kinsley and... Dave Barry. |
Chicago Sun-Times (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-31 00:00>
Bill Bryson could write an essay about dryer lint or fever reducers and still make us laugh out loud. |
San Francisco Chronicle (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-31 00:00>
Painfully funny and genuinely insightful...Bryson has never been wittier or more endearing. |
The Wall Street Journal (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-31 00:00>
Wonderfully droll...Bryson is unparalleled in his ability to cut a culture off at the knees in a way that is so humorous and so affectionate that those being ridiculed are laughing too hard to take offense. |
View all 18 comments |
|
|
|
|
