Neither Here Nor There - Bill Bryson

One Sunday morning a few years ago, I came downstairs to the sound of tittering in the front room. On entering, I found my father sat in a chair with a copy of The Mail on Sunday's 'Night and Day' magazine, a smile on his face and chuckling at regular intervals. My father has emitted laughter easily enough at the cinema or watching TV, but I'd never seen him tickled so much by the written word so naturally I had just to find out what he was reading. His source of amusement was at the back of the magazine - an article written by the American traveller and journalist Bill Bryson. For about eighteen months in the late nineties Bryson wrote ...  Read the complete review

This is a review of Neither Here nor There only; not of the dual volume with the Lost Continent, so please no comments about the Lost Continent being lost from this op.... It retails for £7.99, although you can now purchase it as mentioned in a double volume with the Lost Continent, another of Brysons works. Bill Bryson, a short, tubby bearded American hailing from Des Moines, has a penchant for travelling and has become world famous (and very rich, one suspects) as a result of documenting his many travels in a series of humorous travel books. The New Statesman refers to his books as 'the Animal House of the genre', and I have to agree - not for ...  Read the complete review

In 1972, a young Bill Bryson came to Europe, and spent an enjoyable four months traipsing hither and thither across the continent, becoming thoroughly smitten with the countries he encountered. Such was his enjoyment, he came back the following summer accompanied by his high-school friend Stephen Katz (later to be seen in A Walk in the Woods), which he acknowledges was 'a serious mistake'. However, he managed to shut his mind to Katz's more tedious idiosyncracies, and had himself a jolly enough time nonetheless. Nearly twenty years later, he came back for a third visit; although he had been living in Europe for the majority of his adult life, he had rarely ...  Read the complete review

'Neither Here nor There' is one of Bill Bryson's earlier 'travel writing' books, which this time focuses on his trip around Europe in the early nineties, visiting many of the places he went to when he came here in his early twenties. Much of what follows is very similar to many of Bryson's other novels - he visits a city/country, makes some observations about the places or attractions on offer, often he makes witty observational comments on what's going on at the time there, and also he will occasionally make jokes at his own expense, which is even more funny. But one thing is for sure, lots of what he writes is very interesting (in ...  Read the complete review

'Neither Here Nor There' is an account of the travels through Europe of a middle-aged Anglophile American retracing his 1972 'young American in Europe' tour. Before you switch off thinking 'this is definitely not for me', Bill Bryson is also the funniest and most honest travel writer around – he really does make you laugh out loud. He's not afraid to comment on the various nationalities he encounters and he's not the most PC of writers. But hey, I'm sure we can all agree that the Austrians are a bit weird (they did have Kurt Waldheim as president), and an American who decides England is the country for him has got to be ok, ...  Read the complete review