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Notes from a Small Island |  | Author: Bill Bryson
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Category: Book
List Price: $14.99
Buy Used: $0.13
as of 3/14/2010 23:29 PDT details
You Save: $14.86 (99%)
Seller: internationalbooks
Rating:  292 reviews
Sales Rank: 10432
Media: Paperback
Pages: 282
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.3 x 0.9
ISBN: 0380727501
Dewey Decimal Number: 942.082
EAN: 9780380727506
ASIN: 0380727501
Publication Date: May 1, 1997
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Features:
| • | ISBN13: 9780380727506 | | • | Condition: NEW | | • | Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark. |
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com Review
Reacting to an itch common to Midwesterners since there's been a Midwest from which to escape, writer Bill Bryson moved from Iowa to Britain in 1973. Working for such places as Times of London, among others, he has lived quite happily there ever since. Now Bryson has decided his native country needs him--but first, he's going on a roundabout jaunt on the island he loves. Britain fascinates Americans: it's familiar, yet alien; the same in some ways, yet so different. Bryson does an excellent job of showing his adopted home to a Yank audience, but you never get the feeling that Bryson is too much of an outsider to know the true nature of the country. Notes from a Small Island strikes a nice balance: the writing is American-silly with a British range of vocabulary. Bryson's marvelous ear is also in evidence: "... I noted the names of the little villages we passed through--Pinhead, West Stuttering, Bakelite, Ham Hocks, Sheepshanks ..." If you're an Anglophile, you'll devour Notes from a Small Island.
Product Description
"Suddenly, in the space of a moment, I realized what it was that I loved about Britain-which is to say, all of it." After nearly two decades spent on British soil, Bill Bryson-bestsellingauthor of The Mother Tongue and Made in America-decided to returnto the United States. ("I had recently read," Bryson writes, "that 3.7 million Americans believed that they had been abducted by aliens at one time or another,so it was clear that my people needed me.") But before departing, he set out ona grand farewell tour of the green and kindly island that had so long been his home. Veering from the ludicrous to the endearing and back again, Notes from a Small Island is a delightfully irreverent jaunt around the unparalleled floating nation that has produced zebra crossings, Shakespeare, Twiggie Winkie's Farm, and places with names like Farleigh Wallop and Titsey. The result is an uproarious social commentary that conveys the true glory of Britain, from the satiric pen of an unapologetic Anglophile. "Suddenly, in the space of a moment, I realized what it was that I loved about Britain-which is to say, all of it."After nearly two decades spent on British soil, Bill Bryson-bestselling author of ,i>The Mother Tongue and Made in America-decided to return to the United States. ("I had recently read," Bryson writes, "that 3.7 million Americans believed that they had been abducted by aliens at one time or another, so it was clear that my people needed me.") But before departing, he set out on a grand farewell tour of the green and kindly island that had so long been his home. Veering from the ludicrous to the endearing and back again, Notes from a Small Island is a delightfully irreverent jaunt around the unparalleled floating nation that has produced zebra crossings, Shakespeare, Twiggie Winkie's Farm, and places with names like Farleigh Wallop and Titsey. The result is an uproarious social commentary that conveys the true glory of Britain, from the satiric pen of an unapologetic Anglophile.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 292
 Notes on a small island by Bill Bryson February 28, 2010
Happy Reader (Pretoria, SOUTH AFRICA)
I read this book a few years ago and just loved it. I could just picture the whole trip vividly and felt like I had a wonderful holiday myself and it was so informative too.
Wonderfully fun January 18, 2010
Thinkerthinker (Chicago, IL USA)
Had such an enjoyable time with this book, laughing almost every single page. Bryson has got such keen observation skills and can really turn a phrase. Wonderful writing, wonderful wit. Need a good laugh (who doesn't these days?), this book is highly recommended. I'm going for more of Bryson soon.
Land of Milk and Bryson January 12, 2010
Giles Gammage
Mr Bryson, American by birth but British by choice for most of his professional life, built a thunderous reputation for his hysterically funny, gloriously opinionated and deliciously warped writing style. His brand is built on the comfort that comes from reliability, and Notes from a Small Island comes as close as you'll get to a pure distillation of the Bryson mini-genre.
Reading one of Bill Bryson's books is, ironically enough, a bit like stepping into one of the McDonald's he so loathes. His name on the cover is as much a signpost and promise as the golden arches. Before you've even digested the Library of Congress data, you already have a fairly good idea of how the rest of it is going to taste.
The ostensible subject is Mr Bryson's tour of the UK prior to moving briefly back to the US in the mid 90s, but this quasi-victory lap gets second billing next to Mr Bryson's own interior monologue of memories, acidic commentary on the state of modern architecture, and other off-the-wall thoughts. For such a brilliant travel writer, he again proves an appallingly bad traveler. Mr Bryson travels largely alone, often by rail or bus, frequently without checking the timetable and almost never with a reservation waiting at the end. He encounters Fawltyesque hoteliers, boorish trainspotters and man-eating Labradors - but the main threat to his health is his habit of trying to walk back to his hotel after about three pints too many.
Travel writing can sometimes feel like subsidizing somebody else's good time, to places you've never heard of at prices you couldn't afford; Andean backpacking, Andaman Sea scuba-diving, or pretty much anything in Conde Nast Traveler. Not so with Mr Bryson. Let other writers tackle the Bamiyan Valley or Borobudur - Mr Bryson takes you nowhere more exotic than Barnstaple and Bradford. But then, that's what makes reading his books so much like burrowing into a favorite sweater.
Not that Mr Bryson is without the power to impress. The awe he feels on viewing a Roman mosaic at a ruined villa in Spoonley Wood, intact and in situ, is palpable and moving. The anger and sadness he seems to feel at the cancerous corrosion eating away at small-town England feels genuine, as does his passion for the English countryside (and, unlike many weekend enthusiasts, Mr Bryson put his family where his mouth is, living first in rural Yorkshire, and more recently a small town in Norfolk).
Above all, in spite of his news-ticker stream of grumbling about almost everyone he meets, you get a strong sense of Mr Byson's love for the English themselves. He is full of praise for their politeness, good humor, their delight in life's small pleasures. That said, the book's one sour note is how pat Mr Bryson's observations of the English are. According to Wikipedia, in a 2003 BBC4 Radio poll, Notes from a Small Island was voted the book which best represented England, which probably says far more about the British self-image than the reality. At the very least, you have to think there's something other than good manners and jokes at work in the country that gave the world soccer hooliganism.
Just as the portrait of the English painted here somewhat lacking in perspective, Mr Bryson's coverage of the British Isles is on the teenager end of the spotty scale. Of the UK's great university towns, Oxford rates a visit, but Cambridge gets a miss (secretly gratifying to those of us whose parents went to the former). The famous white cliffs are notable primarily for their absence. There's a gaping hole where the center of England should be, and what bits of Wales make it into the book probably wish they hadn't.
However the greatest problem with Notes from a Small Island, as with Big Macs, is that comfort starts to wear after a bit, and you yearn for something a bit tangier, a bit zestier, something that will surprise. Just as his books are superficially similar to one another, so the individual episodes that make up Notes from a Small Island begin to run together - small towns, good, large towns, bad. Old buildings good, new buildings, bad. To paraphrase Mr Bryson himself, the trick to good travel writing is knowing when to stop, and here--even when presented with an obvious finale like the northern tip of Scotland--he fails to take his own advice. The end result is undoubtedly funny, but in need of some strategic trimming.
Perhaps even Mr Bryson began to feel he was recycling his own greatest hits, as he now writes on diverse subjects such as the English language, the history of science and the life of Shakespeare. Luckily, these books too are uproariously funny, and highly recommended once you've devoured Mr Bryson's travelogues.
 Grudging effort from an author capable of better December 19, 2009
Alan F. (MA)
You will quickly gather from the other reviews that "Notes from a Small Island" is a description of Bryson's farewell trip through England, punctuated with much whining and some appalling displays of mean-spiritedness. After I had soldiered on for a good while through Bryson's periodic ranting, it struck me that perhaps he was oblivious, deliberately or unknowingly, that his troubles were at least partially of his own making. He had decided to make his way through Britain by public transit and by foot in a season when the weather is bad and the frequency of trains and buses is reduced. He seems to have made this decision not because it would lead to the richest travel experiences, and hence the best book, but because it fit the most practically into his schedule. I could accept this if only Bryson would acknowledge it himself, even if merely by curtailing his mumbling about the weather and the difficult train connections.
I would also have appreciated it if Bryson had recognized that his ad hoc style of choosing an itinerary was also responsible for many of his pratfalls. I will grant that in the days before train timetables and museum websites were easy to find on the Internet, it was a nontrivial task to collect the many individual pieces of information that told us how we could get from here to there. But Bryson doesn't even seem remotely embarrassed when he arrives at yet another closed museum, or discovers that a train doesn't run on Sundays off-season. Instead, it's the world's damn fault for not keeping the places open long enough for him to stumble into them when he happens to get there.
Bryson's haphazard way of plotting a journey cheats us not only of a look at places that might interest us, but also a consistent approach that would help us get the feeling we're getting to understand the island. This lack of thematic organization is especially egregious in comparison to "A Walk in the Woods," where he and his buddy set out to walk from one end of the Appalachian Trail to the other. They're woefully poorly equipped to do so, and in fact they end up cheating by skipping sections and tackling others as day hikes. But the fact that a clear goal exists makes the book far stronger. Even in "In a Sunburned Country," where he is exploring the continent of Australia rather than a linear trail, Bryson's narrative is driven by a desire to get somewhere. By contrast, while it's possible to deduce some vague south-to-north progress in "Notes from a Small Island," non-Britons who are not already familiar with the geography of the island are out of luck. Bryson does not even provide a map, which would surely have been at least as helpful as the glossary he did insert.
Despite these major failings, I was glad to have been along at those moments when Bryson did actually encounter something open (the remains of a worker community, a seaside town) because his insights are often worthwhile. I just wish that someone (an editor? his long-suffering wife?) had induced him to give this travelogue the effort it deserved.
Required Reading December 15, 2009
G.M. Malliet
As an American writing novels set in Britain, I have all this "research" to do. I call it research but it's pure pleasure: Books about village life circa 1917. Or books about the life of Shakespeare, or about the quirks of the English language.
But Notes on a Small Island is really hard to justify as research. It's simply too much fun.
Bryson's description of the oddities of the British train system alone is hilarious, but nearly every page will have the Anglofile nodding - and grinning, and laughing aloud - in recognition.
Highly recommended. I wish he'd write an updated version.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 292
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