Made in America - Bill Bryson

Bill Bryson is probably best known in this country for his travel writings, especially "Notes From a Small Island" (though in my view "The Lost Continent" is still to be bettered). But, somewhat less known to most people, he is also an accomplished linguist, and "Made In America" is an excellent advertisement for his skills in this department. The idea of the book is to explain, for a mainly British audience (Bryson's books sell very poorly in his native US, perhaps because some - *some!* - Statesiders have trouble with anything that isn't of the "ain't the good ol' US of A jes' wunnerful?" school), the ...

Bill Bryson has an amazing talent ? he can write about the most boring, dry and deadly dull topic yet make it seem fascinating. Although he is most well known for his travel books such as Notes From A Small Island and Neither Here Nor There, he has also written several books on other subjects. One is the recent A Short History Of Nearly Everything, a very accessible book covering just about all of science, and another is the earlier Mother Tongue, a book on the English language. This review is on Made In America, which is a successor to Mother Tongue, but there ...

When Bill Bryson got hold of this subject he sure went to town! I suppose to a certain extent this could be considered as something of a follow up to Mother Tongue, the history of the development of the English language, charting as it does the development of American version of the language. This book though delves deep into the spawning of America and its progression to what it represents to us today. I would consider this to be Bill's most thorough work, weighing in at almost 500 pages, complete with index, lengthy bibliography and complete chapter reference notes. Despite the formal sound of all that, rest assured it is written in a very ...