The Lost Continent
- 320
- Pages
- about 6 h
- Reading time
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Our view
“The Lost Continent” is a comic road trip through small-town America in which the jokes come at the locals’ expense. Back from a decade in England, Bryson drives almost fourteen thousand miles looking for the small town of the films of his youth. Readers who share his humour find it funny; many others find the narrator smug and unkind, and some tire of the repetition. A book for those who like their travel writing sarcastic.
The view of the BookRank editors, written from readers’ ratings and comments. It does not affect the score or the book’s place in a ranking.
About the book
"I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to." And, as soon as Bill Bryson was old enough, he left. Des Moines couldn't hold him, but it did lure him back. After ten years in England he returned to the land of his youth, and drove almost 14,000 miles in search of a mythical small town called Amalgam, the kind of smiling village where the movies from his youth were set. Instead he drove through a series of horrific burgs, which he renamed Smellville, Fartville, Coleslaw, Coma, and Doldrum. At best his search led him to Anywhere, USA, a lookalike strip of gas stations, motels and hamburger outlets populated by obese and slow-witted hicks with a partiality for synthetic fibres. He discovered a continent that was doubly lost: lost to itself because he found it blighted by greed, pollution, mobile homes and television; lost to him because he had become a foreigner in his own country.
Where the score comes from
The sources average 7.4 across 149 ratings — not yet many, so the reader vote carries 50% of the weight and the rest pulls toward the Rankings average of 7.8. That is how 7.6 comes out.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Library | 8.9 | 11 | 7% |
| Google Books | 7.0 | 5 | 3% |
| Hardcover | 7.2 | 133 | 89% |
In this book
Themes this book shares with others — each leads to the best books on it.
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