I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America after Twenty Years Away

by Bill Bryson

Overview

A CLASSIC FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF ONE SUMMER

After living in Britain for two decades, Bill Bryson recently moved back to the United States with his English wife and four children (he had read somewhere that nearly 3 million Americans believed they had been abducted by aliens—as he later put it, "it was clear my people needed me"). They were greeted by a new and improved America that boasts microwave pancakes, twenty-four-hour dental-floss hotlines, and the staunch conviction that ice is not a luxury item.

Delivering the brilliant comic musings that are a Bryson hallmark, I'm a Stranger Here Myself recounts his sometimes disconcerting reunion with the land of his birth. The result is a book filled with hysterical scenes of one man's attempt to reacquaint himself with his own country, but it is also an extended if at times bemused love letter to the homeland he has returned to after twenty years away.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780767903820
Publisher:	Crown Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/06/2000
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	81,729
Product dimensions:	5.13(w) x 7.95(h) x 0.63(d)
Age Range:	14 - 18 Years

About the Author

Bill Bryson was born in Des Moines, Iowa. For twenty years he lived in England, where he worked for the Times and the Independent, and wrote for most major British and American publications. His books include travel memoirs (Neither Here Nor There; The Lost Continent; Notes from a Small Island) and books on language (The Mother Tongue; Made in America). His account of his attempts to walk the Appalachian Trail, A Walk in the Woods, was a huge New York Times bestseller. He lives in Hanover, New Hampshire, with his wife and his four children.

Hometown:

Hanover, New Hampshire

Date of Birth:

1951

Place of Birth:

Des Moines, Iowa

Education:

B.A., Drake University, 1977

Read an Excerpt

Mail Call

One of the pleasures of living in a small, old-fashioned New England town is that it generally includes a small, old-fashioned post office. Ours is particularly agreeable. It's in an attractive Federal-style brick building, confident but not flashy, that looks like a post office ought to. It even smells nice—a combination of gum adhesive and old central heating turned up a little too high.

The counter employees are always cheerful, helpful and efficient, and pleased to give you an extra piece of tape if it looks as if your envelope flap might peel open. Moreover, post offices here by and large deal only with postal matters. They don't concern themselves with pension payments, car tax, TV licenses, lottery tickets, savings accounts, or any of the hundred and one other things that make a visit to any British post office such a popular, all-day event and provide a fulfilling and reliable diversion for chatty people who enjoy nothing so much as a good long hunt in their purses and handbags for exact change. Here there are never any long lines and you are in and out in minutes.

Best of all, once a year every American post office has a Customer Appreciation Day. Ours was yesterday. I had never heard of this engaging custom, but I was taken with it immediately. The employees had hung up banners, put out a long table with a nice checkered cloth, and laid on a generous spread of doughnuts, pastries, and hot coffee—all of it free.

After twenty years in Britain, this seemed a delightfully improbable notion, the idea of a faceless government bureaucracy thanking me and my fellow townspeople for our patronage, but I was impressed and grateful—and, I must say, it was good to be reminded that postal employees are not just mindless automatons who spend their days mangling letters and whimsically sending my royalty checks to a guy in Vermont named Bill Bubba but rather are dedicated, highly trained individuals who spend their days mangling letters and sending my royalty checks to a guy in Vermont named Bill Bubba.

Anyway, I was won over utterly. Now I would hate for you to think that my loyalty with respect to postal delivery systems can be cheaply bought with a chocolate twirl doughnut and a Styrofoam cup of coffee, but in fact it can. Much as I admire Britain's Royal Mail, it has never once offered me a morning snack, so I have to tell you that as I strolled home from my errand, wiping crumbs from my face, my thoughts toward American life in general and the U.S. Postal Service in particular were pretty incomparably favorable.

But, as nearly always with government services, it couldn't last. When I got home, the day's mail was on the mat. There among the usual copious invitations to acquire new credit cards, save a rain forest, become a life member of the National Incontinence Foundation, add my name (for a small fee) to the Who's Who of People Named Bill in New England, help the National Rifle Association with its Arm-a-Toddler campaign, and the scores of other unsought inducements, special offers, and solicitations that arrive each day at every American home—well, there among this mass was a forlorn and mangled letter that I had sent forty-one days earlier to a friend in California care of his place of employment and that was now being returned to me marked "Insufficient Address—Get Real and Try Again" or words to that effect.

At the sight of this I issued a small, despairing sigh, and not merely because I had just sold the U.S. Postal Service my soul for a doughnut. It happens that I had recently read an article on wordplay in the Smithsonian magazine in which the author asserted that some puckish soul had once sent a letter addressed, with playful ambiguity, to

HILL
JOHN
MASS

and it had gotten there after the postal authorities had worked out that it was to be read as "John Underhill, Andover, Mass." (Get it?)

It's a nice story, and I would truly like to believe it, but the fate of my letter to California seemed to suggest a need for caution with regard to the postal service and its sleuthing abilities. The problem with my letter was that I had addressed it to my friend merely "c/o Black Oak Books, Berkeley, California," without a street name or number because I didn't know either. I appreciate that that is not a complete address, but it is a lot more explicit than "Hill John Mass" and anyway Black Oak Books is a Berkeley institution. Anyone who knows the city—and I had assumed in my quaintly naive way that that would include Berkeley postal authorities—would know Black Oak Books. But evidently not. (Goodness knows, incidentally, what my letter had been doing in California for nearly six weeks, though it came back with a nice tan and an urge to get in touch with its inner feelings.)

Now just to give this plaintive tale a little heartwarming perspective, let me tell you that not long before I departed from England, the Royal Mail had brought me, within forty-eight hours of its posting in London, a letter addressed to "Bill Bryson, Writer, Yorkshire Dales," which is a pretty impressive bit of sleuthing. (And never mind that the correspondent was a trifle off his head.)

So here I am, my affections torn between a postal service that never feeds me but can tackle a challenge and one that gives me free tape and prompt service but won't help me out when I can't remember a street name. The lesson to draw from this, of course, is that when you move from one country to another you have to accept that there are some things that are better and some things that are worse, and there is nothing you can do about it. That may not be the profoundest of insights to take away from a morning's outing, but I did get a free doughnut as well, so on balance I guess I'm happy.

Now if you will excuse me I have to drive to Vermont and collect some mail from a Mr. Bubba.

(Some months after this piece was written, I received a letter from England addressed to "Mr. Bill Bryson, Author of 'A Walk in the Woods,' Lives Somewhere in New Hampshire, America." It arrived without comment or emendation just five days after it was mailed. My congratulations to the U.S. Postal Service for an unassailable triumph.)

Table of Contents

	Introduction	xi
1.	Coming Home	1
2.	Mail Call	5
3.	Drug Culture	9
4.	What's Cooking?	13
5.	Well, Doctor, I Was Just Trying to Lie Down	17
6.	Rule Number 1: Follow All Rules	20
7.	Take Mc Out to the Ballpark	24
8.	Help!	28
9.	A Visit to the Barbershop	31
10.	On the Hotline	35
11.	Design Flaws	39
12.	Room Service	43
13.	Consuming Pleasures	47
14.	The Numbers Game	51
15.	Junk-Food Heaven	55
16.	How to Have Fun at Home	59
17.	Tales of the North Woods	63
18.	The Cupholder Revolution	69
19.	Number, Please	73
20.	Friendly People	77
21.	Why Everyone Is Worried	81
22.	The Risk Factor	85
23.	The War on Drugs	89
24.	Dying Accents	93
25.	Inefficiency Report	97
26.	Why No One Walks	101
27.	Wide-Open Spaces	105
28.	Snoopers at Work	109
29.	Lost at the Movies	113
30.	Gardening with My Wife	117
31.	Ah. Summer!	121
32.	A Day at the Seaside	125
33.	On Losing a Son	129
34.	Highway Diversions	133
35.	Fall in New England	138
36.	The Best American Holiday	142
37.	Deck the Halls	146
38.	Fun in the Snow	151
39.	The Mysteries of Christmas	155
40.	Life in a Cold Climate	159
41.	Hail to the Chief	163
42.	Lost in Cyberland	167
43.	Your Tax Form Explained	171
44.	Book Tours	175
45.	The Waste Generation	179
46.	A Slight Inconvenience	185
47.	At the Drive-In	189
48.	Drowning in Red Tape	194
49.	Life's Mysteries	198
50.	So Sue Me	202
51.	The Great Indoors	206
52.	Death Watch	210
53.	In Praise of Diners	214
54.	Shopping Madness	218
55.	The Fat of the Land	222
56.	Your New Computer	226
57.	How to Rent a Car	231
58.	The Wasteland	235
59.	The Flying Nightmare	239
60.	Enough Already	243
61.	At a Loss	248
62.	Old News	252
63.	Rules for Living	256
64.	Our Town	261
65.	Word Play	265
66.	Last Night on the Titanic	269
67.	Property News	273
68.	Life's Technicalities	277
69.	An Address to the Graduating Class of Kimball Union Academy, Meriden, New Hampshire	281
70.	Coming Home: Part II	285

What People are Saying About This

Mary Higgins Clark

Nightmarish suspense.

Interviews

On Tuesday, May 25th, barnesandnoble.com welcomed Bill Bryson to discuss I'M A STRANGER HERE MYSELF.

---

Moderator: Welcome, Bill Bryson! Thank you for taking the time to join us online this evening to discuss your new book, I'M A STRANGER HERE MYSELF. How are you tonight?

Bill Bryson: I'm very well, thank you, and very pleased to be here.

---

John from East Village, NYC: Hi, Bill Bryson. I was just wondering: Were you writing these essays at the same time you were writing A WALK IN THE WOODS? Do your experiences on the Appalachian Trail figure into I'M A STRANGER HERE MYSELF anywhere? Just curious. I'm a big fan. Can't wait to read it.

Bill Bryson: First, thanks for the compliment. Much appreciated. And second, the columns followed almost immediately upon the completion of the hiking.

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Penney from New Hampshire: The essays in this book were originally intended for a British audience, and I'm sure it has something to do with how you were able to make the minutia of American life so entertaining. Would you have written these essays any differently if it they were intended for an American audience? Would they have ever been written at all?

Bill Bryson: No, I probably wouldn't have written them any differently. Even though they were written for a British audience in the first instance, I think the observations I make apply universally. Obviously, I was writing about American things, because that was the assignment, but I could have made the same points about any modern culture.

---

Helen Katz from Salt Lake City, UT: Do the British understand your sense of humor? Does [Stephen] Katz understand your sense of humor? Why doesn't anyone understand my sense of humor? Oh, sorry, that's another Q&A group! Please come visit "behind the Zion curtain" (that's Utah, for you Gentiles)!

Bill Bryson: Yes, the British do seem to understand my sense of humor, bless them. And Stephen Katz (not his real name, but very much a real person) seemed to appreciate the humor very much as well. His words to me, when he read the book, were: "Aw, Bryson, it's all bullsh**, but it's very funny."

---

Lucy Frost from Cocoa, FL: Mr. Bryson, I've enjoyed all your books, but THE LOST CONTINENT is still my favorite. Are there any other places here in the U.S. you might be writing a book about in the future? Thank you.

Bill Bryson: I would love to write about lots of places in America. There are still many places I haven't been to. But my big project this year is writing a book about Australia, so I am afraid America will have to wait.

---

Jen from Jersey City, NJ: I love your travel and nonfiction books, and I just love your writing style. But have you ever considered or attempted writing a novel? Do you think you ever will?

Bill Bryson: The main thing that appeals to me about a novel would be not having to leave home. But I have never thought seriously about writing one -- at least not yet.

---

Laura from Indiana: Hi, Mr. Bryson. I enjoyed reading I'M A STRANGER HERE MYSELF very much. Has your friend Simon talked you into any more projects? By the way, I know where a Burma Shave sign is!

Bill Bryson: I've given Simon an agreement in principle to write some more stuff for him next year. Where's the Burma Shave sign? I'd love to see it.

---

Joy Mansinha from [e-mail]: Are you planning to write a book after traveling in India? I can't wait to read it. More than that, I would love to be your traveling companion on this trip! I loved your book NEITHER HERE NOR THERE, especially since I was married to a Swiss and lived in CH and Germany for many years. That book helped me to survive a very lonely Christmas in Ottawa. If you are planning to be in NYC, I would love to meet you to have a coffee! By the way, I have been in Hanover; it reminded very much of the country I grew up in, Canada.

Bill Bryson: I'm afraid I have no plans, at this stage, to be in India any time soon, but I would love very much to go one day. Thank you very much for the kind words. I'm glad you found my book useful.

---

Patti from Cobb County, GA: For all the writing you do about folks you meet during trips, has it become a problem that these people you now meet know you and your writing and sort of "ham it up" for you? Thanks!

Bill Bryson: No, thank goodness. The only times I've been recognized were a couple of occasions recently in Australia by British vacationers. I made a television series in the UK last year, and they recognized me from that. But otherwise, I've never been recognized by anyone, anywhere, while gathering material for a book.

---

Laura from [e-mail]: How has your success changed your life?

Bill Bryson: It made it much, much busier!

---

Prion8 from Los Angeles: Hi, Bill. How are you? I just wanted to say that I really enjoyed A WALK IN THE WOODS. Keep them coming.

Bill Bryson: Thank you very much. I can't afford to stop -- I've got two kids in college!

---

Blake Wintory from Fayetteville, AR: Mr. Bryson, how is I'M A STRANGER HERE MYSELF different from THE LOST CONTINENT?

Bill Bryson: In a lot of ways. For one thing, I'M A STRANGER HERE MYSELF is made up of a lot of short, self-contained essays. THE LOST CONTINENT, on the other hand, was a single narrative. Also, I've mellowed considerably!

---

Tim from Hartford, CT: What are your three favorite cities in the world? Just a curious fan...

Bill Bryson: That's a tough one, but off the top of my head, I would say London, New York, and Sydney.

---

Bubba from Vermont: You grew up in America, so I imagine your early writing style originated here. But having spent so much time abroad, would you say your writing style has become British? Now that you're back here, how would you describe it?

Bill Bryson: I'm not consciously aware of any particular geographical leanings in my writing, but obviously I must have been influenced by the fact that I've spent roughly one half of my life in America and one half in Britain.

---

Moderator: Do you have any books you've been saving up to read this summer?

Bill Bryson: RESURRECTION DAY by Brendan DuBois. I haven't even looked at it yet, but somebody told me it's really, really good. I'm just about to read THE SONGLINES by Bruce Chatwin. And THE FATAL SHORE by Robert Hughes again as research for my Australia book.

---

Stan from New York: Hi, Mr. Bryson, I'm a big fan of your work and would like to ask if you feel that you've ever gone too far with your humor -- if you think you've ever crossed the line from humorous to hurtful. I'm thinking specifically of the passage in NOTES FROM A SMALL ISLAND where you rather ridicule a family of fat people who are dining at a table near you. I have to admit that I found that passage a bit over the top and even a bit malicious, compared to most of your work, and I wonder if that passage or anything else you've written ever caused you any regret.

Bill Bryson: The danger with humor is that you always run the risk of pushing it too far. I'm sure I've done that lots of times, possibly even with the family you refer to (but they did take the last dessert.

---

Adam from Bedford, NH: I live in New Hampshire myself and was wondering if you get any inspiration from the state.

Bill Bryson: As a matter of fact, I do. Sometimes when things aren't going well, I'll go for a walk in the woods near where we live, and that always helps.

---

Keith Lawson from Cyprus: Bill, thanks for excellent reads, but where do you get your route directions from? Everybody knows that neither the A30/A303 nor the A361 should feature on any route from Surrey to Cornwall...it is far better to go by..... P.S. I may be living in Cyprus, but I'm from another small island.

Bill Bryson: [laughs] Can you repeat that in much more detail?

---

Laura from Indiana: Hi again. The Burma Shave sign is by a little town in Indiana. I thought it was funny, so I took some pictures.

Bill Bryson: Thank you, but I could do with a tiny bit more guidance.

---

Jill McDermott from Florida: Who are your favorite British contemporary authors? American contemporaries? How do our current tastes differ?

Bill Bryson: I don't get to read a lot for pleasure, because so much of the reading I do is connected with work. But bearing that in mind, among British authors, I particularly enjoy reading Redmond O'Hanlon, Ian McEwan, and Julian Barnes. Among American writers, I enjoy Anne Tyler, Cormac McCarthy, and John Irving. But my favorite of all these days is the Irishman Patrick O'Brian.

---

Philip from Denver, CO: Why do you think so many Americans believe they have been abducted by aliens? And more importantly, do you believe these accounts to be true?

Bill Bryson: [laughs] I have no idea, and no.

---

Ty Pennington from Indiana: When you were returning to America, did you consider settling anywhere other than where you live right now?

Bill Bryson: Yes, we thought about lots of possibilities and decided more or less arbitrarily on New England, because it's a nice region, it's a beautiful area, it has a good choice of attractive communities, and because we decided that we wanted four seasons.

---

Moderator: Thank you, Bill Bryson! Best of luck with your new book, I'M A STRANGER HERE MYSELF. Before you leave, do you have any closing comments for the online audience?

Bill Bryson: Thank you very much for tuning in and for reading my books. It's been a pleasure.

---

Editorial Reviews

"Painfully funny and genuinely insightful...Bryson has never been wittier or more endearing."
—San Francisco Chronicle

"Wonderfully droll...Bryson is unparalleled in his ability to cut a culture off at the knees in a way that is so humorous and so affectionate that those being ridiculed are laughing too hard to take offense."
—The Wall Street Journal

"Bill Bryson makes writing look too easy."
—USA Today

"A cross between de Tocqueville and Dave Barry, Bryson writes about today's America in a way that's both trenchantly observant and pound-on-the-floor, snort-root-beer-out-of-your-nose funny."
—San Francisco Examiner

"Bill Bryson could write an essay about dryer lint or fever reducers and still make us laugh out loud."
—Chicago Sun-Times

From the Publisher

The Barnes & Noble Review
Bill Bryson is a man caught between two countries. After living in England for 20 years, Bill Bryson returned to America and found himself in a foreign land of microwave pancakes and garbage disposals. Bryson, author of the bestselling A Walk in the Woods, began writing a weekly newspaper column about life in America for a British publication, Night & Day. This column evolved into I'm a Stranger Here Myself, a hilarious portrait of America in all its bizarre glory.

Bryson's sketches of the quirks, hassles, and joys of American life are witty and vivid, and contain a delicious irony in that the American author is writing a travel narrative about the strangeness of life in America. ATMs, pay phones, and automated gas pumps are all sources of confusion and potential embarrassment for Bryson -- and, for readers, gales of laughter. His piece on junk food is one of the best, complete with a frenzied Bryson grabbing packages left and right from grocery store shelves. In his litany to junk food, Bryson fantasizes about sugary breakfast cereals, spray can cheese, breakfast pizza, and all of the unhealthy things his English wife never brings home. He later changes his tune when his wife forces him to actually eat all of the junk he bought.

As a travel writer, Bryson's eye is finely tuned to the small things that distinguish one place from another. In I'm a Stranger Here Myself, you get a glimpse of the essence of America through these small details. The friendliness of using first names, the absurdity of long PIN numbers, the mysteries of the hardware store -- for Bill Bryson, it means home.

--Julie Carr

bn.com

The Barnes & Noble Review
Bill Bryson is a man caught between two countries. You can even hear it in his voice — a lilting British accent with American undertones. After living in England for 20 years, Bill Bryson returned to America and found himself in a foreign land of microwave pancakes and garbage disposals. Bryson, author of the bestselling A Walk in the Woods, began writing a weekly newspaper column about life in America for a British publication, Night & Day. This column evolved into I'm A Stranger Here Myself, a hilarious portrait of America in all its bizarre glory.

Bryson's sketches of the quirks, hassles, and joys of American life are witty and vivid. ATMs, pay phones, and automated gas pumps are all sources of confusion and potential embarrassment — and, for listeners, laughter. His piece on junk food is one of the best, complete with a frenzied Bryson grabbing packages left and right from grocery store shelves. In his litany to junk food, Bryson fantasizes about sugary breakfast cereals, spray can cheese, breakfast pizza, and all of the unhealthy things his English wife never brings home. He later changes his tune when his wife forces him to actually eat all of the junk he bought.

As a travel writer, Bryson's eye is tuned to the small things that distinguish one place from another. In I'm A Stranger Here Myself , you get a glimpse of the essence of America through these small details. The friendliness of using first names, the absurdity of long PIN numbers, the mysteries of the hardware store — for Bill Bryson, it means home.

There are two sorts of columnists worth reading. One is the expert -- someone like Robert Christgau of the Village Voice, a guy who's breathed music for 30 years and knows more about the subject than Billboard does. The other kind is simply fascinating -- someone like Louis Lapham of Harper's Magazine, who can make a connection between Louis XIV's court and Reagan's cabinet one month and write on cultural commodification the next.

Bill Bryson, the author of the set of columns collected in I'm a Stranger Here Myself, is neither fascinating nor an expert. He's an American who wrote travel books and newspapered in England for 20 years before returning to New Hampshire with his wife and family in 1996. He's also the author of the 1998 bestseller A Walk in the Woods, a travel diary that details his aborted attempts to hike the entire length of the Appalachian Trail.

The best parts of A Walk in the Woods worked because not much happened along the trail; in order to fill in the holes, Bryson became something of an expert, studying and researching people, flora, fauna, history and park politics. There's none of that rigor in I'm a Stranger Here Myself, a coattail collection of columns, originally written for the British magazine Night & Day, that examine the minutiae of American life in neat four-page chunks. In one piece the subject is a small-town post office on customer-appreciation day; in another it's the tedium of highway driving. Nostalgia accounts for several essays about motels, drive-in theaters, small-town living and the beauty of Thanksgiving.

An editor of mine once told me that any writer you give a column to sooner or later ends up writing about television; he believed that writers are lazy people who would rather turn on the idiot box than get out of their bathrobes and report. Bryson starts writing about television in his third column. (He misses coming home drunk in England and watching lectures on Open University.) That column sets up a trap that he falls into for the rest of his book: Almost all of his subjects come to him. An article in the Atlantic Monthly becomes a column about the ludicrous drug war; a box of dental floss works itself into a confused meditation on consumer warnings and born worriers; a catalog prompts a thousand words on shopping. His laziness is contagious: If you read several columns in one sitting, you get to the point where you start skipping over weak leads ("The other day something in our local newspaper caught my eye"; "I decided to clean out the refrigerator the other day").

Bryson tries to make up for his reportorial torpor with jokes, as if he thinks we're more likely to enjoy a few strung-together paragraphs about barbershops if there's a zinger about Wayne Newton's hair at the end. He also relies on several crutches to get him through his weekly deadlines. Having returned to the States, he trades in the English smirk at absurdity for cudgeling exaggerations -- "help the National Rifle Association with its Arm-a-Toddler campaign" -- and he wraps almost every piece with a tacked-on paragraph that

To be fair, he's occasionally funny. (In a story about snowmobiling: "The next thing I knew I was on the edge of the New Hampshire woods, wearing a snug, heavy helmet that robbed me of all my senses except terror.") And in a few columns -- one on sending his son off to school, another about why autumn leaves change colors -- he actually invests either himself or his resources enough to give the work emotional or intellectual ballast.

Those moments are dismally few. When Bryson's editor at Night & Day persuaded him to write a column on American life for a British audience, he probably imagined something like Alexis de Tocqueville channeled through Dave Barry. What he got instead was the observational humor of a second-rate Seinfeld leafing through the mail in his bathrobe. -- Salon

Jeff Stark

After living in Britain for 20 years, humorist Bryson (A Walk in the Woods, LJ 4/1/98) moved his family back to the United States and settled in a small New Hampshire town. His British editor convinced him to write a weekly newspaper column about his impressions of America. "Mostly I wrote about whatever little things had lately filled my days--a trip to the post office, the joy of having a garbage disposal for the first time, the glories of the American motel." This book is a collection of those pieces, charting Bryson's progress "from being bewildered and actively appalled in the early days of my return to being bewildered and generally charmed, impressed, and gratified now." While featuring his trademark humor (fans find Bryson hysterically funny, while others think he's snide and sarcastic), I'm a Stranger Here Myself seems a bit slight and choppy. Because of Bryson's popularity, this will be in demand, but steer first-time readers to Notes from a Small Island (LJ 4/1/96) or The Lost Continent (LJ 7/89). [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 1/99.]--Wilda Williams, "Library Journal" Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Bryson has never been wittier or more endearing than in these pages....Painfully funny and genuinely insightful.

San Francisco Chronicle

...Bryson [has] found his shtick, and he's sticking to it....Bryson's America is often wonderful but bewildering in all its vast, commercialized contradictions....The saving grace...is that even when Bryson attempts to crack old chestnuts...he can be a genuinely funny fellow....pleasingly cranky...
— The New York Times Book Review

Elizabeth Gleick

I'm a Stranger Here Myself is...like being in stop and go traffic with a bemused, entertaining writer...[He] finds most of his material in encounters with modern life.
— USA Today

Bob Minzesheimer

In [this] wonderfully droll book...Bryson sets hes tart pen to chronicling the absurdities and virtues of the american way of life...Mr. Bryson is unparalleled in his ability to cut a culture off at the knees in a way that is so humorous and so affectionate that those being ridiculed are laughing too hard to take offense...But in addition to all the fun he pokes at Americans, he also writes with true warmth about the kindness of his neighbors...It should be said that a familiarity with the British way of doing things will help readers truly appreciate some of the funnier jokes. But most of the time, Mr. Bryson's barbed punchlines hit their mark.
— The Wal Street Journal

Flatley

Waggish observations on everyday life in the US from bestselling Bryson (A Walk in the Woods, 1998, etc.), a guy who can find the humor in a bag of hammers and, often enough, the lesson too. Returning stateside after decades in Britain, Bryson was tapped to pen a weekly column for the British Mail on Sunday about life in America. What he offered was not a vast systematic picture, but rather quick sketches to reveal what unnerved and exhilarated him upon his return, what appalled him and what made him happy. And that is just what he delivers with these two-to-four-page broadsides, the revelatory minutiae that distinguish the US from all other countries. Take running shoes: "If my son can have his choice of a seemingly limitless range of scrupulously engineered, biomechanically efficient footwear, why does my computer keyboard suck?" He wants to know why a letter in the name of a certain toy company is reversed—"Surely not in the hope or expectation that it will enhance our admiration?"—or whether the executives in that company carry business cards saying "Dick _ Me." There are snorting jabs at the post office and car mechanics and hardware salesmen and, in particular and at length, his own moronic behavior (like "wrapping a rubber band around my index finger to see if I can make it explode" to test his body's tolerance of extremes). While this collection of almost six dozen pieces has a broad streak of guffaw-aloud humor, there are also occasional, spot-on critiques—as of the patent absurdity, "the zealous vindictiveness" of the US government's war on drugs—and a lone, touching item on sending his eldest son off to college that is so unexpected and disarming itcomes like a blow to the solar plexus. Truly and beguilingly, if you are a jaded resident of the USA, Bryson can rekindle your wonder and delight in the life and land around you. ($75,000 ad/promo; author tour; radio satellite tour)

Kirkus Reviews