bill bryson the road to little dribbling review

His skill as a travel writer rests in the fact that he challenges usual notions and folklore, facts and statistics that have for long been taken as truisms. Mary, sitting right beside them, was miraculously spared.” In addition to her father tumbling over a cliff, one of her sisters dies in a house fire and three of her siblings were killed by a lightning strike. “…she is a curiously unlucky person to be close to. While referring to Mary Anning, he observes that For instance, the highest and most famous mountain in the world is named for a man who had no connection to it and whose name we don’t even pronounce correctly. He inundates the reader with well-researched information on geographical boundaries, history of the origin of names of places and brow-raising facts. Bryson is hands down the undisputed ‘Master of irrelevant but interesting’ trivia. What will keep a reader gripped to the 300 page travelogue is trivia. Many have names that suggest they have reached us from a distant galaxy: Ri-Ri, Tulisa, Naya, Jai, K-Pez, Chlamydia, Mo-Ron.” “Anatomically many of them don’t even seem quite human. While reading a magazine picked up from the neighbouring seat on a bus, he wonders why exactly these celebrities are famous. The Road to Little Dribbling begins with Bill appearing for a test to obtain British citizenship, intending to retain the American citizenship (He is an American, with a love-hate-mock relationship with Britain).īryson’s strength lies in word play and humour - self-deprecating, witty and acerbic. The Road to little Dribbling – An American’s adventure in Britain Two decades ago in 1995, he traced the same route alone, the outcome of which was ‘Neither Here Nor There’. Bryson had travelled England with a friend as a young chap. He wants this new discovery to be christened as the ‘Bryson Line’. He presents a theory where the belief that the longest line across England is not from Land’s End to John o’Groats (870 miles) but till Dunnet Head, which is a few miles further. This time he challenges himself to travel the longest distance you can travel in the country in a straight line. The witty sexagenarian travels the Great Britain again, but with a new twist. Billy Bryson’s latest book ‘The Road to Little Dribbling – Adventures of an American in Britain’ takes up an old-new challenge.

Bill bryson the road to little dribbling review