A Walk In The Woods: Rediscovering America On The Appalachian Trail
Bill Bryson
Read April-May 2008
Copy borrowed from Ramsey County Library, White Bear Lake branch
Essay written Sunday, May 25th, 2008
I checked out I'm A Stranger Here Myself also by Bryson on this same trip to the library and started reading it first. It was awful. It was a collection of columns written for a British periodical, and they were tragically predictable. He employed the Dave Barry trick with every single chapter/column. That's where you finish the piece with a one-liner which ties in an earlier concept. Stand-up comedians do it all the time and it makes me embarrassed for them.
I could only make it through the first few chapters of that. Luckily, I knew Bill Bryson was better than that, having read a number of his travel books previously. A Walk In The Woods was bound to be better, and it was.
Bryson has a marvelous tone. Vulgar, dapper, knowledgable, amusing. The chapters with him and Katz were so entertaining that the chapters without Katz were kind of a drag. Not much, but a little.
Not as good as The Lost Continent, I didn't think, but that was a hard one to top.
The endless passages about how incompetent the U.S. Forest Service is left a bad taste in my mouth. I suspect I was getting a lot of misguided information. I would have been glad to hear the USFS's director's rebuttal. I don't have facts to counter Bryson's claims myself, but I have a feeling that there's a lot more to the story. Numbers can be staggering, but I recognize the telltale signs of bias. That's not to say that I think Bryson was doing this on purpose, but perhaps the source of his information was unfairly representing the data to him and he was passing it along.
I'm not saying his claims aren't true, but I am saying I'm not ready to crucify the USFS based on Bryson's assertions alone. There's more to the story. And I'm too lazy to research it.
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