A Walk in the Woods

Title: A Walk in the Woods
Author: Bill Bryson
Publisher: DoubleDay, 1997 (First)
ISBN: 9780385408165
Pages: 320

This book is an interesting addition to the Bill Bryson collection of an avid reader as he is one of the greatest travel writers of the world. He and his friend Stephen Katz hiked through portions of the Appalachian Trail in the US in the spring of 1996 and this book is a humorous account of that memorable trek through the wilderness. The Appalachian Trail (AT) is an iconic, 2200-mile public footpath spanning 14 US states between Springer Mountain in Georgia and Mount Katahdin in Maine. It is managed by a robust public-private partnership and is the longest continuous, hiking only footpath globally. It attracts three million visitors annually. There are three types of hikes in the trail: Thru-Hiking attempts to hike the entire trail in a single continuous journey; Section-Hiking attempts the trail in smaller, separate chunks over multiple years or decades; and Day-Hiking which explores short, easily accessible segments for a few hours or a single day. Bryson and his friend aspired for a Thru-Hike and started from Georgia on that note. The tough conditions on the trail and extreme weather due to a slowly-retreating winter prompted them to break the journey and attempt a sectional-hike near the end of the trail. Unfortunately, they stopped after two days probably because the hardships of the trek greatly outweighed their expectations of the possible benefits. In the meantime, Bryson did several Day-Hikes while the other was busy with work. In that sense, the duo attempted all three kinds of the trekking and in a single year. The book is eminently readable and a thoroughly enjoyable one. On the final count, the team walked 870 miles in total or just over a third of the entire trail.

A trekking route of this mind-boggling scale is a tribute to the vastness of the US since it could earmark such an expansive piece of real estate for a purely non-commercial activity. An expert hiker would take nearly five months to complete the entire trail. Bryson makes fun of similar trekking circuits in England for its shortness. It is possible to reach a comfortable inn at the end of each day's trek in England whereas the AT requires the enthusiasts to stay in the forest for many days at a stretch and even up to several weeks. The trail in the Appalachians was conceived in the 1920s by a visionary called Benton MacKaye as a hiking trail connecting a network of mountain camps where urban workers could come and refresh themselves. Myron Avery mapped it out and personally superintended the construction of hundreds of miles of path by voluntary labour. He extended its planned length from 1200 miles to well over 2000. The trail was formally completed in 1937. The path had no historical basis. It did not follow any Red Indian trails or colonial post roads and is a genuine product of twentieth century innovation. It's the largest volunteer-run undertaking on earth.

Bryson periodically snipes at the management of the trail and the surrounding woodlands by the government and there are elements which shock the readers. About 240 million acres of forests are owned by the government and its prime activity is to build roads through them! These are to allow private timber companies to get to previously inaccessible stands of trees. This was written in 1996 and the author mentions that 49 million acres are available for logging. Public infrastructure such as national parks are developed along the route, but these entities are severely deficient of funds even though visitor numbers soared. Camp sites and information centres have been shut, warden numbers slashed and essential maintenance is deferred to pitiable outcomes. Environmental hazards of the indirect, organic type also abound in the American wilderness. Extinction of tree and animal species is a grave concern. The widely prevalent American chestnut trees became a memory in a few decades due to an Asian fungus that made its way to the continent for which the tree was not evolutionarily prepared. The mortality rate was 100 percent. It infected a tree and spread its spores to nearby ones through breeze or woodpeckers. The trail is also infested with wild beasts such as the bear, moose or python. Bryson also suggests that microbes carrying a whole lot of infectious vectors such as the hantavirus are there, waiting for the trekkers. To cap it all, there are human murderers who attack the trekkers for no reason, often fatally.

Bryson's humorous take of his experience during travel is what makes his literary work a treasure for the readers. And there are lots and lots of it in this book. He observes that time loses its meaning during the trek which is expected to last several months. When it is dark, one goes to his sleeping bag and when it is light, he gets up and everything in between is just in between. You exist in a kind of mobile Zen mode, with your brain like a balloon tethered with string - accompanying, but not actually part of the body below. When a person is on the Appalachian Trail, the forest is his universe - infinite and entire. It is all he experiences day after day. Eventually it is about all he can imagine. He is aware, of course, that somewhere over the horizon there are mighty cities, busy factories, crowded freeways, but there in that part of the country, where woods drape the landscape for as far as the eye can see, the forest rules (p. 138). Even small pleasures away from the toil of hiking brings a flavour of paradise. The author quips that the greatest reason for being grateful to live in the twentieth century is the joy of stepping from outside on a really hot day into the crisp, clean, surgical chill of an air-conditioned establishment. This is a fact we Indians would readily acknowledge and agree to! Several people carry high-tech equipment to the trail to monitor the weather and all but Bryson admonishes this tendency by claiming that the mountains are not for them and they perhaps shouldn't have ventured to the trail. He also takes stock of what he and his fellow trekker gained for their arduous journey of several weeks. Though it didn't change their lives, he gained an appreciation and respect for woods and wilderness and the colossal scale of America. He lost a lot of weight as well and was remarkably fit for a time afterwards.

There are some interesting aspects related to the trail. Every 20 minutes on the AT, a trekker walked further than the average American walks in a week. The near-total dependence of American life on the automobile is seen here. Since the trek begins in early-spring, dangers of very cold weather predominates in the early phase whereas heat is the main concern towards the final stages. This book discusses about hypothermia (death due to low temperature). It tells the story of 16 Danish seamen who were rescued from the North Sea after only 90 minutes following a shipwreck, suddenly dropping dead on the rescue vessel due to earlier exposure to severe cold. This is just an urban myth and there are no official records of it. Bryson estimates in 1996 that about four million people visit the trail every year. But given its immense length it is never crowded, but the shelters sometimes are because they are few as compared to the number of hikers. The Appalachian is a geologically distinct feature in that these mountains are really very old, in fact one of the oldest landscape features on earth. When simple plants colonized the earth and first creatures crawled out of the sea, it was there at a height of three times its present figure. Most of it had withered away by erosion in the meantime. This is not so surprising. A typical mountain stream will carry away about 1000 cu.ft of mountain in a year in the form of sand granules and suspended particles. That's equivalent to the capacity of an oversized dump truck, but over millions of years, the mountain would grind down to a hill. Bryson cites several instances where the American authorities allows the degradation of its environment either by lack of resources or by wilful negligence. He remarks that the attitude of America to nature is peculiar. Either it is ruthlessly subjugated for commercial profit or is deified as something one drives to. Seldom it occurs to anyone that people and nature could coexist to their mutual benefit. The AT need not be all wilderness; it could be routed through rural villages with grazing cows and tilled fields.

Bryson did this trip with a friend whom he had not met for a long time. There were moments of friction, but he manages the situation without descending to ill feelings. The rest-shelters are unattended and in the middle of the forest. You can't reserve them for yourself as it is planned to be occupied on first-come-first-served basis. This necessitates meeting and cooperating with strangers every evening. There were all kinds of people and our duo both saw the heights of magnanimity and the depths of selfishness. Bryson had discontinued the trail a few days after the start and visited portions of it in his car. During this time, he generally substitutes his travel adventures with historical and geological snippets just to keep the readers amused.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 4 Star

One Summer: America 1927

Title: One Summer: America 1927
Author: Bill Bryson
Publisher: Doubleday, 2013 (First)
ISBN: 9780385608282
Pages: 557

This book is a glorified journal entry for the excruciatingly hot summer in the year 1927 which the United States endured. In the five months starting from May to September of that year, the country witnessed some landmark progress in aviation, radio broadcasting and financial prosperity. In addition to this, developments in sports — which means only baseball and boxing in the American context — and sensational news like murders and political assassinations are included. The book summarizes the major events of that summer in a well-researched narrative made richer by a humorous perspective. Looking back a century later, a yawning gulf separates today from that past age. Things we take for granted even in a third world country didn't exist then. Antibiotics still lay a decade in the future. So we read about the President of the USA's 16-year old son developing an infection while playing tennis on the White House grounds. The injury became septic and the boy died a week later. In his autobiography, Calvin Coolidge reflected heartbreakingly that 'when he went, the power and the glory of the Presidency went with him'. Still, there was something romantic about the era as it didn't like practical concerns to get in the way of its musings. Since many of his other books are reviewed here already, Bill Bryson does not need an introduction. Suffice it to say that he is one of my favourite authors.

The 1920s obviously lacked the most common forms of personal entertainment which we now take for granted. There was no mobile phone, no internet, no radio and no TV. That's why people really did gather in enormous numbers for almost any event. The 1920s was the peak decade for reading in American life. Each year, publishers produced 110 million books in more than 10,000 separate titles. The industry was so discreet that it boasted it never published a word that made a maiden blush. Soon, the industry was to be submerged in the flood tide of radio and it soon changed track to accommodate readers' demand for more explicit coverage. Radio picked up very rapidly, reaching every American home. Radio advertising took a large bite off newspaper and magazine ads. Nearly 250 newspapers went under in a decade because of the revenue crunch. Charles Lindbergh's maiden trans-Atlantic flight to Paris was the most famous event in 1927. When he returned triumphantly to the US, it was the day that radio came of age. His arrival was broadcast coast to coast. The ability to sit in one's own living room and listen to a live event in some distant place was as miraculous as teleportation. In spite of all these achievements, crime rate was high. The culprits were not caught in a majority of cases. Where arrests were made, the conviction rate was less than 20 percent.

Bryson observes that the US was staggeringly well-off. American homes shone with sleek appliances and consumer durables that would not become standard in other countries for a generation or more. This was greatly facilitated by the instalment scheme which made its debut along with the consumer revolution. Borrowing became an essential part of life with the invention of the instalment scheme. In the 1920s, America became a high-rise nation. As buildings grew taller, the number of workers pouring into the city centres grew and grew. Unimaginable to us now, but Prohibition was in full force in the US from 1920 to 1933 which mercilessly banned all alcoholic drinks in the country. It shut down the fifth largest industry, turning thousands into bootleggers. In 1927 alone, 11,700 people died from drinking de-natured spirit. The movement started by Wayne Wheeler grew so popular that politicians quickly learned either to support them or to give up any hope of being re-elected. In the 1920s, the share prices kept rising with little correspondence between the prices and the values of the companies they supported. The stock market eventually crashed in 1929, triggering the great depression that traumatized capitalism for a few years.

The central thread in this book is Charles Lindbergh's transatlantic flight and the widespread acclaim it received from an adoring public on both sides of the ocean. Even though the French saw the Americans usually with a low esteem, for a few weeks after Lindbergh's landing, the tide turned on French soil and Americans commanded immense respect. He was feted on a grand scale back home which the introvert Lindbergh found difficult to enjoy and he had an impossible time in that summer. He then embarked on a great aviation tour of America on the same plane on which he flew across the ocean. The tour was very gruelling with 69 overnight stops and 13 'touch' stops. From the moment he left his room in the morning, he was touched and jostled and bothered. Chicken bones and napkins from his dinner plate were fought over in kitchens. Cheques he wrote were rarely encashed; recipients preferred to frame them instead. He had no private life anymore. If he went into a men's room, people followed. Flying between cities was the most restful part of the tour. Bryson pinpoints the real significance of Lindbergh's flight in this book. His tour of America made the country ready for air travel which was unbelievable a year ago. Americans in the 1920s had grown up in a world in which most of the important things happened in Europe. Now suddenly America was dominant in every field such as popular culture, finance and banking, military might, invention and technology.

This book exposes a quirk in American foreign policy. From a different perspective, this can be argued as the basic feature of it as well. The US wanted to send 100 million USD to Austria as food aid after World War I. It was technically an enemy country and American law prevented helping enemies even after war ended. A convenient way around the hurdle was thought up. 45 million USD each was sent to Britain, France and Italy and they obligingly lent the money to Austria on the understanding that it be used to buy American food. This helped American farmers to dispose of surplus food at attractive valuations. But when Austria defaulted on repayment, the US insisted and forced the three intermediaries to pay back. They protested in vain but the US had its way. Transportation was the single sector that grew by leaps and bounds in the period under consideration. But it came with its own set of problems. The railway system was bewilderingly fragmented. One could buy a ticket on any of the 20,000 scheduled services from any of 1085 operating terminals, tracks and ticketing systems. Luxury services in the trains offered a barber, ladies' hairdresser and even a stenographer for taking dictation. The automobile became ubiquitous. Henry Ford revolutionized American car industry by then, but he was an anti-Semite. He accused the Jews of manipulating stock markets, working for the overthrow of Christianity, using Hollywood as a propaganda tool for Jewish interests, promoting jazz music and encouraging the wearing of short skirts. He was greatly admired in Nazi Germany and was the only American mentioned favourably in Mein Kampf. It was said that Hitler kept a framed photo of Ford on his wall. Ford accepted one of Nazi Germany's highest civilian honours — the Grand Cross of the German Eagle.

Even though the US always boasted of personal liberty and an enlightened society, racial discrimination of the coloured people was universal to the point of being institutionalized. When a play in New York showed black and white children playing together as if that were normal, the district attorney for Manhattan sent the police to stop it. This was in the year 1927. Even in the face of severe restrictions, there was a movement of blacks out of the south in the Great Migration. Between 1920 and 1930, 1.3 million southern blacks moved north in the hopes of finding better paying jobs and more personal liberty. Before that period, only 10 percent of blacks lived outside the south. After this era, almost half did. On the other side of the spectrum, the 1920s was also the age of loathing. Bigotry was casual, reflexive and universal. Ku Klux Klan had a resurgence which loathed blacks and Catholics. It had five million members. Eugenics had a large following. In 1927, the US Supreme Court ruled that a woman of low intelligence be sterilized in order to prevent the continuation of her 'imbecile' line. About 60,000 people were sterilized against their will. About 30 states had sterilizing laws and some of them still have those rules in their statute books. 

Baseball is an American game and nowhere outside the US has it any following worth the name. Considering this in mind, readers find the prominent coverage the game gets in the book somewhat tiring and irritating. The biography and playing tenure of George Herman Ruth is a punishment for non-American audience who has no idea of the intricacies of baseball's rules. Similar is the case with boxing. Bryson exhibits fine control of the narrative in a book handling such a large array of diverse topics. The ideas are shuffled regularly but brilliantly made to appear coherent and conforming to the overall plan of the narrative. For example, the chapter on June month links prohibition, World War I, antagonism to German people and a murder victim, all of them referenced in the previous month's chapter as well. The conclusion of the book is admiringly simple, yet evokes a tinge of loss and longing when he condenses the narrative to this line: 'Whatever else it was, it was one hell of a summer.'

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

Mother Tongue

Title: Mother Tongue

Author: Bill Bryson

Publisher: Penguin, 2008 (First published 1990)

ISBN: 9780141037462

Pages: 270

English is the most ubiquitous language used in the world. Even though the number of people who use it as their mother tongue is really small, the rapidly expanding clientele who employ it as a second language make it the world’s most common tongue. It is the most global of languages, the lingua franca of business, sciences, education and politics. Other countries excel the US and UK in many aspects of the language’s everyday usage. In India, there are more than 3000 newspapers in English while there are more students of English in China than there are people in the US. Even this humble blog is the contribution of a person who uses English as a second language and the fact that it has used some 600,000 words so far makes him a little smug! This book was published in 1990, but its point has become further relevant with the spread of computers and the internet. Bill Bryson needs no introduction and he remains one of my favorites.

Bryson’s humour is legendary, but it is strangely subdued in this volume. Anyway, the very first sentence of the book carries the author’s signature with the candid assertion that “more than 300 million people in the world speak English and the rest, it sometimes seems, try to”. This book is not a history of the language nor can it be termed a thorough study in the linguistic sense. Bryson examines many aspects of the tongue’s everyday usage like spelling, American and British varieties, pronunciation, origin of common names, word play and even a chapter on swearing. The narrative is liberally suffused with wit, but not as much as Bryson’s other books.

English now dominates the world beyond doubt, but there was a time when it hung tenaciously on to its home country base whose political power had changed hands many times to foreigners who didn’t even speak a word of it. England remained for a long time under external occupation. The Roman conquest brought civilization to the island, but Viking invasions transformed its structure. Then came the Norman Conquest when the French ruled the roost. No king of England spoke English till 1399 CE when Henry IV began to use it. As recently as the eighteenth century, England chose to install George I, a German, even though he didn’t know English but reigned for thirteen years. The language assumed an inferior position in the Norman society in which the aristocracy was French-speaking while the peasantry spoke English. Linguistic influence of Normans tended to focus on matters of court, government, fashion and high living. That’s why we still see a lot of French-derived words in these domains. However, Bryson points out that it is a cherishable irony that a language that succeeded almost by stealth, treated for centuries as the inadequate and second-rate tongue of peasants, should one day become the most important and successful language in the world.

There are about 2700 languages in the world, of which India leads with 1600 languages and dialects. English has borrowed without any let or hindrance from most of them. Bryson reviews the pathways in which foreign words accrued into his mother tongue. Probably, this makes the English extremely reluctant to learn other languages. The author wonders at the staggering quantity of words accrued. Bryson does not elaborate on one important source of words for English – India. A good number of Indian words have entered the lexicon of the colonial masters after nearly two centuries of imperialist rule over India. Great literary figures have also contributed to the language in the case of new words. Shakespeare used 17,677 words in his writings of which at least a tenth had never been used before, which is an astonishing display of ingenuity. It is also true that the great dramatist and poet lived in an age when words and ideas burst upon the world as never before or since.

The book hints at the powerful urge for standardization when a language loses its insularity and whole societies start to handle them simultaneously. This process began in the fifteenth century with the invention of the printing press. This brought a measure of much needed uniformity to English spelling. Before 1400, it was possible to tell with some precision where in Britain a letter or manuscript was written just from the spellings. By 1500, this had become all but impossible. London spellings became increasingly fixed and standardization was achieved by 1650. With television, the differences between the two most favorite flavors of English are disappearing fast. Since this book came out just before the internet boom, its effect is not analysed.

This book includes a delightful array of words, phrases and comparison with other languages which is ideal for novices and experienced readers of English. This book is a page-turner, but the chapter on names and pronouncing place names is rather clumsy and uninteresting to non-US and UK readers.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star

The Lost Continent

Title: The Lost Continent – Travels in Small Town America

Author: Bill Bryson

Publisher: Black Swan, 1999 (First published 1989)

ISBN: 9780552998086

Pages: 379

Bill Bryson is the king of travel writing. Just read any one of his works and you are hooked for life. But the trouble with Bryson is that he stimulates such a keen longing in you to see those places and share in his strenuous journey through lesser known places. With Google Street View, we can in fact make it happen somewhat – virtually. This book is about an incredible journey of epic proportions. Born in Des Moines, Iowa, Bryson spent most of his adult life in England where he met his wife. He returned briefly to the US and made this tour of the small towns of the country in two stages in 1987-88. Travelling a staggering 22364 km (13978 miles) across 38 states, the author sets a perfect example for all travel writers. Visit to some towns are a repeat of the childhood trips the Bryson family undertook in the continent. In his inimitable style, he takes the readers along a voyage that transcends time and space. Even after a gap of three decades since the book was first published, the narration is crisp and not even a trace of datedness is visible anywhere, except perhaps the availability of better navigation systems now. Readers are assured of a refreshing experience hurtling along with Bryson in his small car across the mountains and valleys of continental America.

The journey avoids big cities as far as possible and follows small towns that don’t offer any distinguishing features except the ubiquitous motel, restaurant, gas station and a few stores. The author claims that America is a nation so firmly attached to small town ideals and so dedicated in its fantasies to small town notions. This enables them to adopt instant friendliness with strangers. In short, it represents everything good in the mores of the society. The first stage of Bryson’s travel took place in October when autumn was silently shedding its leaves to make way for the onset of winter. The book brings the atmosphere alive with a catching reflection of the afternoon. By four o’clock, daylight was going. By five, the sun would drop out of the clouds and was slotting into the distant hills like a coin going into a piggybank. Cold came in instantly and the traveler would long for home.

One difficulty that flummoxed the traveler was the inability of paper maps to size up in scale to show small roads. The continental size of the nation is also partly to blame. Intersections were not clearly discernible causing Bryson to lose way and wander aimlessly on the back roads. That was an era before Sergey Brin and Larry Page had even thought of founding Google, let alone its nectar for travelers – the Google Maps. There are some remarkable firsthand observations in the book. While encountering the Trump Tower in New York, Bryson makes a prescient statement that ‘a guy named Donald Trump, a developer, is slowly taking over New York, building skyscrapers over town with his name on them’ (p.190). Remember, this was in 1987. Now we know what Trump was really keen on back then! Being the land of plenty and richness, there are so few things that last for more than a generation. Americans revere the past only as long as there is some money in it, says the author in a rather unkind manner overlooking the several huge museums he had gone into.

Readers are amazed to notice the racial tensions prevailing in the South of the country. Traditionally, the South was in favour of continuing with the scourge of slavery and went on a civil war to let the barbarity continue. They lost humiliatingly against the Unionists led by Abraham Lincoln. Racial tensions were still simmering in the background during Bryson’s journey. Interactions between the races seem to be small, as the author could ‘see’ and report about blacks and whites chatting at bus stops and a black nurse and a white one travelling together in a car. The civil rights movement gathered momentum in the 1960s and the process of assimilation had still not reached its goal even after two decades. Mississippi is stated to be still racial, as the author claims that he listened to a radio news broadcast about two black men raping a white girl (p.117). Till a few years ago, blacks were not used to sit in restaurant luncheon counters. This was not against the law, but they simply did not dare to do so. In Appalachia, Bryson observes poverty at its worst, even among the Whites. But this poverty is nothing when compared to that in the third world. Forty per cent of the poorest people in the region owned a car and a third of those had been bought new.

Like any other title by Bryson, this one too is immensely satisfying and a real page-turner. His wit and deft handling of awkward situations provide many hours of pleasure to the reader. Like an ideal patriot, there is nothing which enlivens him more than the sight of his home in Iowa at the end of the grueling journey. The scathing criticism of content in American television is matched only by the biting contempt he feels towards the evangelists and pompous promoters of religion. At the end of the journey, Bryson is grateful not only for the good condition of the car, the pleasant weather and safe roads, but for not encountering a single Jehovah’s Witness on the way.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star

The Road to Little Dribbling

Title: The Road to Little Dribbling – More Notes from a Small Island

Author: Bill Bryson

Publisher: Black Swan, 2015 (First)

ISBN: 9780552779838

Pages: 477

Bill Bryson is one of my favourite authors and he needs no introduction. Several of his works were reviewed earlier and ‘Notes from a Small Island’ was one of them. That was the immensely humorous account of Bryson travelling across Britain. That was almost forty years ago. Bryson is an American who fell in love with the old country and, as he says, with one of its inhabitants. The result was him settling in England. Later, he went back to America, but again returned to England. Each of his moves was fruitful in the literary sense. The language is much richer with his informative, absorbing and hugely hilarious accounts of his travels. This book is all about his journeys in England and Scotland after a gap of forty years since he first visited them. Bryson is careful not to repeat travel to places he had covered in his first visit, but obviously can’t suppress the pull of nostalgia for some places. Here again, the travel is from the extreme south to the extreme north of the country. The readers are enriched by a commendable repertoire of anecdotes, incidents, reminiscences related to architecturally and naturally noteworthy buildings and places. You just can’t put this book down. Of course, that should not be taken too literally, in typical Bryson style!

The author, as noted above, is deeply in love with Britain and does not economize on his praise. Readers will be amazed to learn that the country is packed with good stuff such as castles, stately homes, hill forts, stone circles and medieval churches. The number is huge and Bryson claims that there are 450,000 listed buildings, 20,000 scheduled ancient monuments, 26 world heritage sites, 1624 registered parks and 600,000 known archeological sites in this ‘small island’! Besides, the country leads others in inventiveness. In the modern era, Britain has produced 55 per cent of all the world’s significant inventions, compared to America’s 22 per cent. Not only that, the book pays glowing tribute to the quiet, orderly nature of Britons. It argues that England is so quiet as to resemble a library. The voices in England don’t order you to do something, but they invite you to make your way.

Going by the crisp descriptions of Bryson’s travel, England is superbly beautiful as well as admirably suited for leading happy lives. In fact, Google’s Street View offers a helpful feature for a virtual tour of the countryside with practically every street in England covered under a series of high-resolution photographs so that by navigating through it, we get the feel of actually being in the place. It’s a good idea to try it as we follow Bryson through each chapter and it’s going to be a wonderful experience. Try https://streetviewmaps.co.uk and search for say, Hayfield or Cockermouth. The book claims that there isn’t a landscape in the world that is more artfully worked, more lovely to behold, more comfortable to be in than the countryside of Great Britain. It is the world’s largest park and its most perfect artificial garden.

Perhaps it is the author’s eye for natural beauty that makes him rile against removal of greenery in the name of economic development. Thinking is afoot in influential circles to downsize the green belt around cities. Bryson pulls out all his guns to shoot down the idea. The green belt transpires oxygen, shelters wildlife, sequesters carbon and pollutants, grows food, and adds grace and tranquility to the landscape. He sees through the selective manipulation of data by the business lobby that drives the reform package. This clever trick is noteworthy as they might be repeated elsewhere too. An article once appeared in Guardian that declared that Surrey has more land for golf courses than the 2.5 per cent it earmarked for homes. Closer inspection of the data on which this result was based indicated that it summed up only the actual plinth area of the homes and completely left out gardens and parking spaces. It was designed to provoke the public against green cover in the form of golf courses that was of utility only to the rich. In this instance, when the data was reviewed, the area shot up six times to14 per cent. Even with this caveat, the need to find the right balance between growth of the economy and natural beauty is plainly evident. Many of the towns and villages visited for the second time after four decades show unmistakable signs of economic decline. This is alarming. Without a robust industry to pay for nature, how can the country get going in the first place?

Falling standards in the handling of language such as the gross errors and elimination of proper punctuations and sloppy grammar attracts Bryson’s ire. This is understandable, as his diction is impeccable and envyingly exquisite.

The book is strongly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star