I'm a Stranger Here Myself

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 Myselfrecounts 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. From the Trade Paperback edition.

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