bill bryson the road to little dribbling review

For example: Bryson spots a well-to-do woman in a café in the northern English town of Keswick giving a measly ten-pence tip on a twenty-pound tea (about fifteen cents on thirty dollars) and ponders the “quietly disgraceful” behavior of the British. The British press has largely tried to dress up the dullness of this latest British Baedeker by focusing on the few controversies that it courts. But if inevitability were an assurance of artistic merit, then all movie sequels would be great and all made-for-campaign political bios unforgettable. The Road to Little Dribbling was a book whose time had come, in other words.

Though this record of his British travels wasn’t quite the hit that his Appalachian misadventure turned out to be, Bryson admits in one of his rare moments of un-self-effacing promotional zeal that the book “did awfully well there.” A Guardian editor went so far as to proclaim him an “adopted national treasure.” Now that he was becoming a citizen, wasn’t it about time for a follow-up? The book wasn’t really Bryson’s idea, he tells us in the introduction: His publisher pointed out that it had been twenty years since the publication of Notes from a Small Island, Bryson’s travel book about England. Domestic box-office numbers were about where you’d expect a moderately successful middle-aged-hiking-buddy comedy to be these days-$28,425,479, as of this writing.Ī month after A Walk in the Woods was released in the US, Bryson’s country of origin, The Road to Little Dribbling was released in the UK, where his wife and daughters claim citizenship and where he had recently taken the test to join them in legal Englishness. Robert Redford played Bryson, who in real life looks like your bearded, bespectacled, kindly uncle. The film sported an all-star, long-toothed cast, including Nick Nolte and Emma Thompson.

After a long tour in development hell, the movie based on his 1998 book, A Walk in the Woods-his chronicle of a months-long trek, with an old friend, along the 2,100-mile Appalachian Trail-finally found its way into American theaters in September. Superficially, 2015 has been a banner year for Bill Bryson.

Bill bryson the road to little dribbling review