Synopses & Reviews
The Appalachian Trail covers fourteen states and over 2,000 miles. The longest continuous footpath in the world, it stretches up the east coast of the United States from Georgia to Maine. It snakes through some of the most spectacular landscapes in North America, as well as through some of its most poverty-stricken and primitive backwoods areas--home to rednecks, moonshine, shotguns and bears.
God only knows what possessed Bill Bryson, a reluctant adventurer if ever there was one, to undertake this gruelling hike. Perhaps it was just a long-held ambition to lose weight and get fit. As he wrote from the trail to his publisher: "Speaking of vigorous exerercise, boy have I just had some. Maine was a bitch. I want you to come back and walk it with me so that when you die if you go to hell you will be able to say: 'Call this hell? Try walking across Maine in August.'"
Bryson combines the comic tradition of Twain, Thurber and Perelman with a peculiarly British sense of irony to produce a view of the world that is uniquely, hilariously, his own.