by Andrew H Brown

Created on: October 26, 2009

I'm a fan of Bill Bryson. I like his dry, acerbic wit, and the way he bombards the reader with lots of dry facts yet manages to still keep it entertaining.

The latest book of his I read (although not the latest written), was Notes from a Big Country.

As I said, delivering trivial facts and figures in an amusing fashion is Bryson's forte and when those facts are about the land of his birth (USA), and are compared then related to his once adopted homeland (UK), I can visualize him virtually drooling at the prospect.

And so, following his return to live in New England after 20-odd years domiciled in Olde England, when the editor of the British newspaper, The Mail on Sunday, asked him to write a weekly magazine column documenting his return home, you would imagine he'd leap at the chance.
Actually, he kept complaining that he didn't have the time and was dragged into the enterprise kicking and screaming.
I'm afraid it shows.


The book is a collection of 78 of these articles which were written over a period of 18 months between Oct '96 and May '98 after he and his English family returned to the US and settled in New Hampshire.
As they were originally published in the aforementioned newspaper, there's not a great deal of point reading the book if you're a subscriber to that paper. I'm not, so it was all fresh reading to me.

Or it would have been, if certain incidents, facts and anecdotes didn't keep cropping up with annoying regularity throughout.

Each of the 'chapters' is a little over two pages, so it's easy reading and also very adaptable to picking up and putting down. But, because each chapter is a complete work as such, certain little passages are repeated and this can make the book as a whole seem very repetitive.



The dominating theme of the book is his astonishment, and sometimes horror, at how American* society has changed while he's been away. This is counterbalanced by his English-born family's immediate adoption of their new, American way of life, which he finds a little difficult to understand.
This reaction to his family is quite a strange attitude from a man who settled in England for many years and who so readily embraced the different culture there. Of course, as Bryson points out so often, Americans sometimes don't quite get irony. Which is all rather...erm...ironic, really.

The subjects of each article are wide and varied, so it's almost impossible to give a synopsis of the book here. Suffice to say, that Bryson does his usual clinical

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