I'm a Stranger Here Myself - (Notes on Returning to America After 20 Years Away) by Bill Bryson (Paperback)

About the Book

Now in paperback comes the affectionate, hysterically funny tour of America's most outrageous absurdities from a master humorist. Delivering the brilliant comic musings that are his hallmark, Bryson, who recently returned to the U.S. after living abroad for 20 years, proves that there's truly no place like home, especially if it's in America.

Book Synopsis

A classic from the New York Times bestselling author of A Walk in the Woods and The Body.

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 Myself recounts 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.

Review Quotes

"Painfully funny and genuinely insightful...Bryson has never been wittier or more endearing."
--San Francisco Chronicle

"Wonderfully droll...Bryson is unparalleled in his ability to cut a culture off at the knees in a way that is so humorous and so affectionate that those being ridiculed are laughing too hard to take offense."
--The Wall Street Journal

"Bill Bryson makes writing look too easy."
--USA Today

"A cross between de Tocqueville and Dave Barry, Bryson writes about today's America in a way that's both trenchantly observant and pound-on-the-floor, snort-root-beer-out-of-your-nose funny."
--San Francisco Examiner

"Bill Bryson could write an essay about dryer lint or fever reducers and still make us laugh out loud."
--Chicago Sun-Times

About the Author

Bill Bryson's bestselling books include A Walk in the Woods, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, and A Short History of Nearly Everything (which won the Aventis Prize in Britain and the Descartes Prize, the European Union's highest literary award). He was chancellor of Durham University, England's third oldest university, from 2005 to 2011, and is an honorary fellow of Britain's Royal Society.