Summary of Bill Bryson's The Lost Continent , livre ebook

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Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 Des Moines is a small town that is known to be hypnotic. It is the most powerful hypnotic known to man. People either accept it and settle down with a local girl named Bobbi, or they spend their adolescence moaning about how awful it is and how they can’t wait to get out.
#2 I grew up in Des Moines, and I can tell you that the place gets a grip on you. People who have nothing to do with Des Moines drive in off the interstate, looking for gas or hamburgers, and stay forever.
#3 I once had to drive to Minneapolis. I went on a back road just to see the country, but there was nothing to see. It’s just flat and hot, and full of corn and soybeans and hogs. Every once in a while you come across a farm or some dead little town where the liveliest thing is the flies.
#4 I never felt at home in Iowa, even when I was a child. I wanted to be a European boy, and I wanted to live in an apartment across from a park in the heart of a city. I wanted to ride trams and understand strange languages.

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Publié par	Everest Media LLC
Date de parution	20 mars 2022
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781669355663
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0150€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Insights on Bill Bryson's The Lost Continent
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

Des Moines is a small town that is known to be hypnotic. It is the most powerful hypnotic known to man. People either accept it and settle down with a local girl named Bobbi, or they spend their adolescence moaning about how awful it is and how they can’t wait to get out.

#2

I grew up in Des Moines, and I can tell you that the place gets a grip on you. People who have nothing to do with Des Moines drive in off the interstate, looking for gas or hamburgers, and stay forever.

#3

I once had to drive to Minneapolis. I went on a back road just to see the country, but there was nothing to see. It’s just flat and hot, and full of corn and soybeans and hogs. Every once in a while you come across a farm or some dead little town where the liveliest thing is the flies.

#4

I never felt at home in Iowa, even when I was a child. I wanted to be a European boy, and I wanted to live in an apartment across from a park in the heart of a city. I wanted to ride trams and understand strange languages.

#5

Iowans are a very friendly and trusting people. They are also slow, but not because they are incapable of high-speed mental activity, but because there is not much call for it.

#6

My father, who lived his entire life in Iowa, had a quietly maniacal urge to get out of the state and go on vacation. Every summer, without any notice, he would load the car and take off for some distant point. He would return to get his wallet after driving almost to the next state.

#7

My father had an instinct for picking bad picnic sites. He would spend hours turning the gas stove that came with his portable camping kit to keep it out of the wind. The stove would flicker to life only for a few seconds before shutting down.

#8

I wanted to go back to the magic places of my youth and see if they were as good as I remembered them being. I wanted to hear the long, low sound of a Rock Island locomotive calling across a still night, and see lightning bugs.

#9

In Iowa, it had been a year without summer. The sky was a deep, hypnotic blue, and fields of mustard and green stretched out before me. I followed the highway to Otley, where I planned to retrace the route my father always took to my grandparents’ house in Winfield.

#10

Middle America is extremely flat and featureless, and it’s so quiet that you can hear a sneeze miles away. It’s almost impossible to live a life so devoid of stimulus.

#11

The best county town in Iowa is Pella, forty miles southeast of Des Moines. It was founded by Dutch immigrants and every May it still holds a big tulip festival for which they get somebody important like the mayor of The Hague to fly in and praise their bulbs.

#12

I traveled east through Oskaloosa, Fremont, Hedrick, Martinsburg, and then on to Winfield, where I felt a pang of recognition. I had not been down this road for at least a dozen years, but its gentle slopes and isolated farms were as familiar to me as my own left leg.

#13

When I was young, I would visit my grandparents’ house in Winfield. It was always Christmas there, or Thanksgiving, or the Fourth of July, or somebody’s birthday. There was always happiness there.

#14

I had expected my grandparents to be waiting for me at the gate, but they were both dead. I had hoped that another nice old couple would live there now and invite me in to look around and share my reminiscences. But that was not to be.

#15

I once had to drive past the town of Winfield, Kansas, which had been reduced to a few abandoned buildings and a tavern. I couldn't understand what had happened. People must have had to drive thirty miles to buy a loaf of bread.

#16

I love the New York Times, and I love the advertising supplements. They show a life of richness and variety beyond the wildest dreams of most foreigners. As if to illustrate my point, the issue before me contained a gift catalog from the Zwingle Company of New York offering scores of products of the things-you-never-knew-you-needed variety.

#17

I was always fascinated by the food and household products advertisements in the Zwingle catalog. The advertisements for dog food were the same, except that they weren’t usually chocolate flavored.

#18

I drove south on Highway 218 to Keokuk. This stretch of the road was marked on my map as a scenic route, though these things are decidedly relative. Compared with an afternoon in a darkened room, it wasn’t bad. But compared with, say, the coast road along the Sorrentine peninsula, it was perhaps a little tame.

#19

I drove on, and the road turned to gravel. I had visions of hoses rupturing, hot oil spraying everywhere, and me rolling to a steamy, hissing halt out here on this desolate road. I was relieved that I had stopped in Dullard, a small town near the highway.

#20

I had a meal of gristle and baked whiffle ball at a place called Chuck’s. I went into a dark place called Vern’s Tap and took a seat at the bar. I was the only customer. The barmaid was friendly. She had been the local good-time girl since about 193-1.

#21

I met a woman named Flo in a bar in Dullard. She was very open about her life, and told me in great detail about her many marriages and crimes. Eventually, the guy in the corner started listening in on our conversation, and when I told him I was from Britain, he asked where I was from.

#22

I had never seen Joyce Brothers, the extremely boring guest on the Johnny Carson show, in person, but I was comforted by her presence in my dream. She was like downstate Illinois made flesh.

#23

I crossed the Mississippi River at Quincy. It was majestic, but also flat and dull. The farmers who crossed the river to go to town seemed to be in no rush.

#24

Farmers don’t feel pain, so they often accidently tear off their fingers and throw them into the next field.

#25

I went to see Mark Twain’s boyhood home in Hannibal. It is a small gold mine for the town, and visitors are drawn to it by the recorded messages telling them about the rooms as if they were morons.

#26

I visited Hannibal, Missouri, and was shocked by how sad and awful it was. The whole town seemed to trade on Mark Twain and his books, and I couldn’t help but feel that they were sad and awful people.

#27

I was looking for the perfect town while on my trip. I thought there had to be one out there in America, and I wanted to find it.

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