I'm a Stranger Here Myself
Notes on Returning to America After 20 Years Away
By Bill Bryson
(Broadway Books, Paperback, 9780767903820, 304pp.)
Publication Date: June 6, 2000
Other Editions of This Title: Compact Disc, Audio Cassette
Categories: Literary, Travelers, United States - 20th Century
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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.
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.
"Painfully funny and genuinely insightful...Bryson has never been wittier or more endearing."
--San Francisco Chronicle
"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."
--The Wall Street Journal
"Bill Bryson makes writing look too easy."
--USA Today
"A cross between de Tocqueville and Dave Barry, Bryson writes about today's America in a way that's both trenchantly observant and pound-on-the-floor, snort-root-beer-out-of-your-nose funny."
--San Francisco Examiner
"Bill Bryson could write an essay about dryer lint or fever reducers and still make us laugh out loud."
--Chicago Sun-Times
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