A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail by Bill Bryson (1998)
After reading Bill Bryson‘s In a Sunburned Country, I figured I had found a friendly author who could offer me some genuine and trustworthy travel adventures from across the globe, shaded with his dark irony and humor and speckled with historical factoids that can make me a wiser person.
After delving about 100 pages into A Walk in the Woods, however, I learned that Bryson isn’t so much a wizened adventure-hunter whose powerful vision and experiences are pure gold once they hit the page. In fact, he’s simply a regular, out-of-shape dude whose bitterness at his own physical exhaustion and the loss of his creature comforts comes out in vile sarcasm and hatred toward his own fellow-travelers.
Note: this post includes Amazon affiliate links.
The way Bryson treats the heavy girl—as annoying as she might have been in reality—should give cause for anyone to question his amicability toward the human race. A traveler needn’t love everyone, but when he hates so mercilessly on the people about whom he’s writing, the reader has every right to toss the book away without a second thought (see another example of such unwarranted hatred in Why China Will Never Rule the World by Troy Parfitt).
Beyond this (and from a Christian perspective), Bryson’s evolutionary and environmental bent (somewhat subdued in Sunburned) takes center stage in Woods, giving me the insatiable urge either to skip through his preachy pages or to put the book down altogether. I finally did put it down for a period and eventually found myself never picking it up again.
While I’ve added several more of Bryson’s books to my library (I specifically look forward to his language-related works like The Mother Tongue and Made in America), it will take me quite a while to get over this hate-fest and crave his writing once more.
I’ve lost respect for Bryson as a writer, for it’s quite clear that in this blogging age where anyone can vent as they wish, only the best-of-the-best writers get published by reputable houses. As such, those writing non-fiction works should really attempt to offer works resulting in the reader’s growth. Reading works by “Jerks who love America” like Bryson and Parfitt simply isn’t enough for me anymore.
©2014 E.T.
Want more reviews like this? Get Elliot’s Weekly Digest.
Check Out These Other American Travelogues:
- Down the Great River by Captain Willard G. Glazier (1887)
- The Road by Jack London (1907)
- America and Americans by John Steinbeck (1966)
- A Walk Across America by Peter Jenkins (1979)
- The Walk West by Peter Jenkins (1981)
- The Road Unseen by Peter and Barbara Jenkins (1985)
- The Education of a Wandering Man by Louis L’Amour (1989)
- A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson (1998)