I am absolutely laughing my butt off reading The Lost Continent by Bill Bryson. It's his first book, and this is not the jolly guy who went to Australia in In a Sunburned Country. He's 30-something, driving around a country he's got mixed feelings about (the US), he curses more, he's not having that great a time, he's mean. I love it. He starts the book bashing his hometown of Des Moines, confirming my own so-boring-it-was-eerie experience with the place on the road trip. I love his later, kinder bestsellers, too, but this take-no-prisoners approach to hick American towns is refreshing in its bluntness, a love-it-or-hate-it first book with nothing to prove and no established audience to offend.

When this book isn't funny, and sometimes even when it is, it's sad. A disappointed Bryson points out all the ways this great country was, even in 1989, becoming a not-as-great country in ways few Americans were, or are, ready to hear. The Amazon reviewers who hated this book (one wondered if Bryson is, indeed, "from here") probably loved Angela's Ashes. It's endearing and heartstring-tugging to read a naive child's-eye view of the faults of a foreign country, but an informed adult's-eye view of your own homeland's shortcomings is too close to the bone.

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Okay, the boring parts of the country get...boring after a while in this book. But Bryson also gets more generous. By the end, he's even saying nice things about Iowa. Who knew?