I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After 20 Years Away

I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After 20 Years Away
by Bill Bryson

I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After 20 Years Away
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Book Summary Information

Author: Bill Bryson
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2000-06-06
ISBN: 076790382X
Number of pages: 304
Publisher: Broadway

Book Reviews of I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After 20 Years Away

Book Review: Whine, whine, whine!
Summary: 2 Stars

This is a collection of short articles in which the author whines about anything and everything. We all know one of those people. They can complain about anything - too hot, too cold, too rainy, too sunny. At one point, he even complained about other people driving with their windows up! How can that bother someone? Several times, I found myself almost in disbelief that he could complain (or even care) about these things.

I would have probably given this book 1 star for the negativity, but he is funny at times, and he had the mercy of making each chapter only a few pages, so the reader only needs to take it in small doses.

Ok: I'm done whining about his whining.

Summary of I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After 20 Years Away

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.



In the world of contemporary travel writing, Bill Bryson, the bestselling author of A Walk in the Woods, often emerges as a major contender for King of Crankiness. Granted, he complains well and humorously, but between every line of his travel books you can almost hear the tinny echo: "I wanna go home, I miss my wife."

Happily, I'm a Stranger Here Myself unleashes a new Bryson, more contemplative and less likely to toss daggers. After two decades in England, he's relocated to Hanover, New Hampshire. In this collection (drawn from dispatches for London's Night & Day magazine), he's writing from home, in close proximity to wife and family. We find a happy marriage between humor and reflection as he assesses life both in New England and in the contemporary United States. With the telescopic perspective of one who's stepped out of the American mainstream and come back after 20 years, Bryson aptly holds the mirror up to U.S. culture, capturing its absurdities--such as hotlines for dental floss, the cult of the lawsuit, and strange American injuries such as those sustained from pillows and beds. "In the time it takes you to read this," he writes, "four of my fellow citizens will somehow manage to be wounded by their bedding."

The book also reflects the sweet side of small-town USA, with columns about post-office parties, dining at diners, and Thanksgiving--when the only goal is to "get your stomach into the approximate shape of a beach ball" and be grateful. And grateful we are that the previously peripatetic Bryson has returned to the U.S., turning his eye to this land--while living at home and near his wife. Under her benevolent influence, he entertains through thoughtful insights, not sarcastic stabs. --Melissa Rossi

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