The Bill Bryson Blog

Charms Of The British

2010-12-05T12:41:00.001Z

As described by the man himself Bill Bryson...

Bill Bryson On The Life And Times Of The Thunderbolt Kid

2010-11-23T12:37:00.000Z

Bill Bryson: King of Curiosity

2010-11-16T20:32:00.001Z

How did salt and pepper become our default, go-to spices? Why are there four tines on a fork? How did stairs become so ubiquitous?

These are just a few of the curiosities explored in Bill Bryson’s latest book, At Home: A Short History of Private Life, which uses the floor plan of the author’s own house - an Anglican rectory in Norfolk, England, built in 1851 - as a springboard to investigate the evolution of how we live today.

CityBeat recently phoned Bryson, a native Iowan who has lived most of his adult life in England, to discuss his latest literary endeavor in anticipation of his visit to Cincinnati Saturday for the Mercantile Library’s annual Niehoff Lecture.

Full interview: Bill Bryson: King of Curiosity

'At Home': Bill Bryson Constructs A History Of Private Life

2010-11-04T12:58:00.000Z

A review of Bill Bryson's "At Home: A Short History of Private Life," which follows the author as he takes a stroll around his own house and examines the objects and spaces that have defined private life for the last 150 years. Bryson discusses his book Oct. 11 at Town Hall Seattle.

Full article: 'At Home': Bill Bryson constructs a history of private life

Interview Time - Bill Bryson

2010-10-28T14:58:00.001+01:00

Rob Savage meets travel writer extraordinaire - Bill Bryson

My days of being a student are sadly disappearing over the horizon at an alarming rate - kind of like an over eater chasing a mobile, all you can eat buffet. However a memory that will always stay with me is the time I graduated and shook hands with the wonderful travel writer and Chancellor of Durham University, Bill Bryson.

I decided to go back to my student roots and ask this amazing man how the St Christopher’s travel writers can improve their game and what it’s like to be one of the greatest authors of all time.

Full article: Interview Time - Bill Bryson

Bill Bryson To Quit As Durham University Chancellor

2010-10-22T08:40:00.000+01:00

Author Bill Bryson is to step down from his role as chancellor of Durham University by the end of 2011.

The 58-year-old said he wanted to spend more time with his family and on developing writing projects.

Full article: BBC News - Bill Bryson to quit as Durham University chancellor

Author Fits The Bill - Shields Gazette

2010-10-18T11:45:00.001+01:00

A WORLD-famous author has made a date with South Tyneside. Travel writer Bill Bryson is to give next year's South Shields Lecture.

He follows in the footsteps of Sir Patrick Stewart, Tony Blair and Lord Kinnock in giving the annual lecture, which is organised by South Shields MP David Miliband.
Full article: Author fits the bill - Shields Gazette

A Look At Travel Writing

2010-10-12T15:51:00.000+01:00

Just think of the greatest adventurers who ever lived and the greatest journeys ever undertaken: the Jews, Marco Polo, Christopher Columbus and Charles Darwin come to mind. All of them had compelling reasons for setting off on dangerous journeys into the unknown. What they found (in their cases the Promised Land, China, America and evolution respectively) soldered them into history and made them famous, but also opened the world to travel as never before.

Travel writing ever since has echoed the odysseys of these great people. Writers still feel it incumbent on them to have some higher purpose to their journeys beyond mere self-indulgence or curiosity. On the rare occasions when travel writers break this rule they tend to fall ill or become irredeemably cranky when they sit down to put their experiences on paper.

The range of reasons travel writers dream up to focus their journeys range from the absurd to the sublime. Take that outstanding wordsmith Bill Bryson. This man literally thought up journeys he could take, to create fodder for his witty irony and superb humorous descriptions. A walk along the Appalachian Trail with an old school friend (do you remember Katz?) became much more than 'A Walk in the Woods' as it was entitled. It was a humorous ramble through the American nature tourist culture and a lambasting of the authorities responsible for the national parks of the United States. It did not matter that Bryson completed only a tiny part of the trail. This incredibly long hike (Bryson spends a few pages embarrassing all the authorities who cannot agree on its exact length) served one purpose and one purpose only; it gave Bryson something to write about.

Similarly Bryson's book about rural America entitled 'The Lost Continent' has a very thin basis to it: Bryson vaguely travels the roads his parents followed, when they took their children on madcap long haul treks across the United States to see the sights (and sites of famous battles and historical occurrences) and generally scrounged their way along on a shoestring budget, to the mystification of the Bryson children. Again Bryson gets his teeth into a subject without much justification. Not that he needs it, you understand.

Bryson made a career of taking whole continents and wrapping them around his tongue, as in 'Down Under', his dry yet informative take on Australia. He went there because he had always wanted to see it and, as the subtext suggests, he was looking for an alternative place to live. He and his family had already done England and New England. As it happened, the Bryson family returned from New Hampshire to Britain, giving down under the thumbs down. Just too many snakes per square kilometer I suppose.

Now we come to the sublime reasons for travel. There are tales of pilgrimage, such as Shirley MacLaine's account of her walk the length of the Santiago de Compostela Camino in northern Spain, the ancient 500 mile pilgrimage route initiated by St James de Compostela ending at Santiago. 'Camino: a journey of the spirit' never reaches any conclusions and elicits no discernible greatness of spirit in the writer, but it surely gave Ms MacLaine fodder for a bestselling book in the bland genre of Californian spiritualism.

Ineffably more substantial is the marvelous book by William Dalrymple 'From the Holy Mountain' in which this handsome young Scot journeys to the places visited by John Moschos some 1500 hundred years before. His beautiful journey through the dying remnants of Byzantium in our own age (he traveled in 1997) is an unforgettable book by a marvelously intelligent Catholic probing the embers of Eastern Orthodox religion.

Between the absurd and the sublime reasons for travel lie many others. In 'African Rainbow' Lorenzo and Mirella Ricciardi traveled along the waterways in Africa, evidently searching for the ultimate noble savage in the European mold. They never found him or her but their book was published. It ends up being an uneasy journey of a couple to a continent they didn't understand.

In 'The Great Railway Bazaar' Paul Theroux travels on the Orient Express, the Khyber Pass Local, the Golden Arrow, the Mandalay Express, an odyssey on great trains from London through Europe and Asia, across Siberia. And his eye misses nothing as he describes this travel mode of a bygone age and these out-of-the-way places, but I always feel that Theroux travels and writes under duress rather than from compulsion, rather like Shiva Naipaul in 'North of South'.

Naipaul visited the insalubrious African countries: Zambia, Tanzania and Kenya, where Asians have been personae non grata in the past, and in some places still are, to find out what makes Africa tick. Of course no one does know what makes Africa tick, not even Naipaul.

Never mind that these men seem to have been uncomfortable about their journeys. Both are renowned travel writers, not least due to their dogged purposefulness. The point, it seems, is to have some intention when moving across the landscape. A traveler without intention is merely a wanderer.

Read more: http://www.articlesbase.com/travel-articles/a-look-at-travel-writing-2612573.html#ixzz129k1Hpqd
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution

Lucien Mays - About the Author: Want to find out about raspberry trellis and freeze dried raspberries? Get tips from the Raspberry Facts website.

Bill Bryson And Mark Carwardine On What Makes A Good Tour Guide

2010-10-11T11:13:00.000+01:00

Graham Boynton
Mark, you say that guides have to work incredibly hard. You need to be leaders, motivators, diplomats and nannies. Is that a fair summation?

Mark Carwardine
You have to be a Samaritan, a nurse, a first aider, a naturalist – an expert at everything. There is a saying that tourists are ordinary well meaning folk that have left their brains at home.

Full article: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/activityandadventure/8036236/Bill-Bryson-and-Mark-Carwardine-on-what-makes-a-good-tour-guide.html

Australia's Big Tourist Attractions - Are They Really Worth Visiting

2010-09-30T10:21:00.000+01:00

Australia has a quaint history of creating big public artworks named after - and resembling - local fruits, vegetables, animals, historical figures and everyday objects. There are now more than 100 of these "big things" around the country.

Perhaps the best known of these is the Big Banana, located in Coffs Harbour, New South Wales. Other big fruit artworks include the Big Apple (Donnybrook, Western Australia) and the Big Pineapple (Nambour, Queensland). Big animal artworks include the Big Merino (Goulburn, NSW), the Big Lobster (Kingston, South Australia), the Big Bull (Wauchope, NSW), and - up in Australia's far north - the Big Crocodile (Jabiru, Northern Territory).

Historical figures given the big treatment include the Big Ned Kelly, a monument commemorating Australia's most famous outlaw (Glenrowan, Victoria), and the Big Captain Cook (Cairns, Queensland). Australia's "big things" have attracted a lot of attention among commentators, sometimes causing a wry smile, sometimes harsh criticism.

In his travel book, In a Sunburned Country, the ever-humorous Bill Bryson writes: "Give [Australians] a bale of chicken wire, some fiberglass and a couple of pots of paint and they will make you, say, an enormous pineapple or strawberry or, as here, a lobster." He describes the 56-foot mammoth statue known as the Big Lobster as reminding him of "the leftover props from a 1950s horror movie." Some tourism writers and cultural commentators criticize these large artworks quite severely, labelling them as gross, blots on the landscape, or tourist traps.

Some of these writers attribute "big statue" construction to the desire of well-meaning but unimaginative bureaucrats and business entrepreneurs to attract foreign and domestic tourists to otherwise unremarkable towns. These same people, they argue, have tended to create with their big statues an often dumbed-down and sanitized version of Australia's industries, history and culture. Others point to a kind of edifice complex, where the locals are blind to the abundance of truly great natural wonders around Australia and prefer to build somewhat tacky theme parks to attract the tourist dollar.

Many would point to the overpriced souvenirs, refreshments and tour tickets that certain of these attractions sell to tourists who stop by for a photo opportunity. Yet it is undeniable that some of these "big" tourist artworks and their surrounds are carefully planned and well executed enterprises which succeed in drawing in a somewhat jaded public and educate them, while entertaining them, about the local industries, agricultural products, history, and everyday culture.

The Big Banana, for example, offers, apart from a free walk-through of the Big Banana statue, an interesting "banana experience" theater that gives visitors a quite detailed, if brief, introduction to bananas and the banana industry. In addition, visitors can take a short tour of the adjacent plantation and taste bananas, banana sweets and smoothies. For the more serious visitors to towns around Australia there are lengthy farm and factory tours, large museums, informative lectures, original historical sites, and carefully constructed replicas. Many of these are run by industry associations, academic institutions, heritage bodies, or local historical societies.

But would those more academic and serious alternatives appeal to ordinary tourists and those with limited time and interest? The answer can perhaps be seen in the fact that thousands of individual tourists and coachloads of travelers continue to come day after day to see the "big" statue attractions.

Perhaps the real question should be: are these "big statue" attractions accurate portrayals of Australia's industries, historical events, and everyday life - or merely glamorized, sanitized and commercialised versions of the reality? And, if they are not accurate, how can they be improved?

Further Information: For some interesting pictures of the Big Banana and other "big" statues in Australia, visit http://www.australiaforvisitors.com/big-things-in-australia.html

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=David_Wagner

A short History Of Private Life - Times LIVE

2010-09-24T12:56:00.000+01:00

Bill Bryson is a comfortably well-known social historian, a reputation which can only be entrenched by his latest offering, At Home: A Short History of Private Life. Bryson uses the medium of his own home in Norfolk to provide an idiosyncratic and irreverent commentary on proto-Victorian mores and morals.

Full review: A short History of Private Life - Times LIVE

Troublesome Words

2010-09-16T14:06:00.000+01:00

What is the difference between mean and median, blatant and flagrant, flout and flaunt? Is it whodunnit or whodunit? Do you know? Are you sure? With Troublesome Words, journalist and bestselling travel-writer Bill Bryson gives us a clear, concise and entertaining guide to the problems of English usage and spelling that has been an indispensable companion to those who work with the written word for over twenty years. So if you want to discover whether you should care about split infinitives, are cursed with an uncontrollable outbreak of commas or were wondering if that newsreader was right to say 'an historic day', this superb book is the place to find out.

Travel Writers Need Compelling Reasons To Travel

2010-09-15T11:13:00.000+01:00

Just think of the greatest adventurers who ever lived and the greatest journeys ever undertaken: the Jews, Marco Polo, Christopher Columbus and Charles Darwin come to mind. All of them had compelling reasons for setting off on dangerous journeys into the unknown. What they found (in their cases the Promised Land, China, America and evolution respectively) soldered them into history and made them famous, but also opened the world to travel as never before.

Travel writing ever since has echoed the odysseys of these great people. Writers still feel it incumbent on them to have some higher purpose to their journeys beyond mere self-indulgence or curiosity. On the rare occasions when travel writers break this rule they tend to fall ill or become irredeemably cranky when they sit down to put their experiences on paper.

The range of reasons travel writers dream up to focus their journeys range from the absurd to the sublime. Take that outstanding wordsmith Bill Bryson. This man literally thought up journeys he could take, to create fodder for his witty irony and superb humorous descriptions. A walk along the Appalachian Trail with an old school friend (do you remember Katz?) became much more than 'A Walk in the Woods' as it was entitled. It was a humorous ramble through the American nature tourist culture and a lambasting of the authorities responsible for the national parks of the United States. It did not matter that Bryson completed only a tiny part of the trail. This incredibly long hike (Bryson spends a few pages embarrassing all the authorities who cannot agree on its exact length) served one purpose and one purpose only; it gave Bryson something to write about.

Similarly Bryson's book about rural America entitled 'The Lost Continent' has a very thin basis to it: Bryson vaguely travels the roads his parents followed, when they took their children on madcap long haul treks across the United States to see the sights (and sites of famous battles and historical occurrences) and generally scrounged their way along on a shoestring budget, to the mystification of the Bryson children. Again Bryson gets his teeth into a subject without much justification. Not that he needs it, you understand.

Bryson made a career of taking whole continents and wrapping them around his tongue, as in 'Down Under', his dry yet informative take on Australia. He went there because he had always wanted to see it and, as the subtext suggests, he was looking for an alternative place to live. He and his family had already done England and New England. As it happened, the Bryson family returned from New Hampshire to Britain, giving down under the thumbs down. Just too many snakes per square kilometer I suppose.

Now we come to the sublime reasons for travel. There are tales of pilgrimage, such as Shirley MacLaine's account of her walk the length of the Santiago de Compostela Camino in northern Spain, the ancient 500 mile pilgrimage route initiated by St James de Compostela ending at Santiago. 'Camino: a journey of the spirit' never reaches any conclusions and elicits no discernible greatness of spirit in the writer, but it surely gave Ms MacLaine fodder for a bestselling book in the bland genre of Californian spiritualism.

Ineffably more substantial is the marvelous book by William Dalrymple 'From the Holy Mountain' in which this handsome young Scot journeys to the places visited by John Moschos some 1500 hundred years before. His beautiful journey through the dying remnants of Byzantium in our own age (he traveled in 1997) is an unforgettable book by a marvelously intelligent Catholic probing the embers of Eastern Orthodox religion.

Between the absurd and the sublime reasons for travel lie many others. In 'African Rainbow' Lorenzo and Mirella Ricciardi traveled along the waterways in Africa, evidently searching for the ultimate noble savage in the European mold. They never found him or her but their book was published. It ends up being an uneasy journey of a couple to a continent they didn't understand.

In 'The Great Railway Bazaar' Paul Theroux travels on the Orient Express, the Khyber Pass Local, the Golden Arrow, the Mandalay Express, an odyssey on great trains from London through Europe and Asia, across Siberia. And his eye misses nothing as he describes this travel mode of a bygone age and these out-of-the-way places, but I always feel that Theroux travels and writes under duress rather than from compulsion, rather like Shiva Naipaul in 'North of South'.

Naipaul visited the insalubrious African countries: Zambia, Tanzania and Kenya, where Asians have been personae non grata in the past, and in some places still are, to find out what makes Africa tick. Of course no one does know what makes Africa tick, not even Naipaul.

Never mind that these men seem to have been uncomfortable about their journeys. Both are renowned travel writers, not least due to their dogged purposefulness. The point, it seems, is to have some intention when moving across the landscape. A traveler without intention is merely a wanderer.

Justine has been a journalist for 20 years and is a contributor to Just The Planet, the online luxury travel magazine for independent travellers.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Justine_Richards

Writing Humour Is A Serious Business

2010-09-14T14:58:00.000+01:00

The writer who can turn out stories or articles that make people laugh, or even simply bring a smile to the reader, are more in demand today than at any other time. If you are fortunate enough to have a natural ability to make people laugh, then put it to good use.

For the writer who feels he or she can contribute to the sum of human happiness, here are a few pointers on how to make a success of it.

The first thing to remember is that humour is subjective. What is funny to one person may easily leave another cold. This depends on both style and subject matter. There are two approaches you can take here. (A) Write stuff in your own style that makes YOU laugh, because if it amuses you then there will be a whole crowd of people out there with your sense of humour who will plug into what you're offering. Alternately (B) write humour that will appeal to a wide range of readers by choosing subjects that have universal appeal. For instance think of the trials of life: growing up; the childhood and teenage years with their growing pains and foolishness; married life; growing old. All have a wide appeal.
Humour is grounded, believe it or not, in the serious things of life and in those universal truths of life. Take, for instance, sit-coms like 'My Family', 'The Royale Family', 'Frasier'. They all deal with real, if exaggerated, life experiences. Bill Bryson has made a name for himself by writing humourously about his travels in both the US and England. He has taken his real life experiences and brought out the funny side.
When writing humour into stories remember that your reader should not be laughing AT your characters but with them. Taking your characters though embarrassing, unfortunate, even dangerous episodes requires that the reader feels sympathetic towards the character whilst at the same time laughing at the situation they are in.
When writing a story make sure you vary the plot by bringing in scenes of tenderness, pathos and seriousness every now and then. This will add a dynamism which takes the reader from the heights of hilarity (we hope) to the more down-to-earth and thoughtful scenes. Make the humour emphasise the pathos and vice versa. A story that goes from gag to gag from start to finish will lack the highs and lows that any story needs.
What makes people laugh the most? Someone slipping on a banana skin is practically top of the list. Or someone sitting on a deck chair which collapses. In such cases the observer, or reader, should be laughing at the comic element of the situation rather than the unfortunate person. Your humour needs to reach that spot in the heart and mind of the reader that makes them say 'That could have been me'. As well as making the reader laugh try to make them feel sympathetic and compassionate as well.

Whatever style of humour you have, there is an audience out there waiting for you, so go for it. Just watch where you're walking!

Mervyn Love offers advice, resources, competition listing, markets and much more on his website. Go here: http://www.writersreign.co.uk Subscribe to his free Article Writing Course here:http://www.writersreign.co.uk/WRac.html

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Mervyn_Love

Bill Bryson Predicted 2010 Economic Gloom Back In The Eighties

2010-09-06T16:47:00.000+01:00

Ho prescient is this quote from Bill Bryson's Notes From a Small Island? "...When a nation's industrial prowess has plunged so low that it is reliant on Korean firms for its future economic security, then perhaps it is time to re-dress one's educational priorities and maybe give a little thought to what's going to put some food on the table in about 2010." Oh, if only a few politicians had read that. Second thoughts, they probably did and ignored it anyway.

"Notes From A Small Island" is a hilarious account of Bryson's adventures travelling across England in the 80s. In the chapter which inspired the above observation he has arrived in Oxford, befuddled by that town's obsessive academia. Discussing "post-Kantian aesthetics", he suggests, is not going to help a country which relies on foreign companies to employ British workers on British turf. He is talking about the new Samsung factory which had just opened in Tyneside and which was to provide 800 jobs for British workers at a time when unemployment was at record levels. Like many at the time, Bryson accurately predicted that this was the beginning of the end.

This current economic crisis is not the fault of the previous Labour government under Brown and Darling, but the long-standing industrial policy begun by 80s Thatcherism which destroyed British manufacturing and handed the vacant lot to foreign investors. Having reduced manufacturing in the UK to an insignificance, mighty powers were then handed to the money men in the City who proceeded to invent countless ways of making money without actually producing anything.

Many experts could see, even at its conception, that this policy was bound to end in tears for the majority of decent, hard-working people. The "good news" is it has provided the perfect opportunity for hundreds, if not thousands, of unscrupulous speculators to step forth and make millions, if not billions. The bad news is that the greed-mania this culture produced has brought the world to the brink of depression and condemned millions to working long years into retirement on low pay.

Bryson, like other pundits, saw the importance of making stuff at home. It is a shame that we are now so far from that world of "buying British" that we take it for granted most of the goods we bring home will have been produced in some far flung land. Now this trend is crystallising in the ascendancy of Chinese manufacturing. Politicians and economists cannot agree on what the long term fallout will be of handing so much of our trade to China. Word of note: one of the causes of the decline of the Roman Empire was obsessive trading with the east. Who says history doesn't repeat itself?

Milton Johanides is a retired businessman, church elder, writer and artist. He has been featured on BBC TVs Songs of Praise, owned numerous art galleries and once ran an award winning picture framing business in Scotland. The views expressed in these articles are his own. email: miltonjohanides@yahoo.co.uk

http://www.helium.com/users/510112/show_articles

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Milton_Johanides

An Open Letter To Bill Bryson

2010-09-06T15:19:00.000+01:00

An open letter to Bill Bryson from a fan on his book Icons of England.

Full Article: An Open Letter to Bill Bryson | Pits n Pots

Artificial Intelligence History and the Bill Bryson Archives

2010-08-20T14:57:00.000+01:00

An artificially intelligent robotic android will need a little knowledge in order to become a viable part of a human grouping, whether that grouping is a family unit, team or even a catering company or a car wash if it will be working along side other humans. This is because humans need a baseline of knowledge in order to be accepted by a group and thus able to discuss relative information or knowledge with one another. Indeed it also helps humans as they further explain a thought to put it into some sort of context.

Now then to program a computer or artificially intelligent android to work well around other humans it will need also a baseline of knowledge, too much knowledge could actually displace the robot in their human grouping and thus make it un-welcomed, outcaste or perhaps disliked. Human groups tend to do this, whether this is a good trait or not is quite irrelevant as it is merely a fact of basic human interaction in groups. Thus we need to address this.

So rather than taking the Bill Gate's approach and reading the entire encyclopedia as a child or programming into a artificially intelligent robotic android the entire set of Encarta on five CD ROMs or attempting to download all the pages of the Wikipedia Website, I propose that we take an over all approach with some dates and facts interspersed.

So, I move we take Bill Bryson's book "A Brief History of Everything" and program that into the robotic android, along with some basic dates that many humans know, such as the signing date of the Declaration of Independence, 1492 Columbus sailed the seas of Blue and the war of 1812; your basic stuff, not enough for the android to be a total smarty pants, but enough to hold its own under your basic organic human unit in the social grouping. Please consider this in 2006.

"Lance Winslow" - Online Think Tank forum board. If you have innovative thoughts and unique perspectives, come think with Lance; www.WorldThinkTank.net/. Lance is an online writer in retirement.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Lance_Winslow

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2010-08-03T15:17:00.000+01:00

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Litter Costs Close To £100 Million

2010-07-28T12:07:00.001+01:00

The costs of cleaning up Britain’s litter epidemic has risen alarmingly in the past year to reach £858 million, despite a campaign by the former Yorkshire Dales resident, writer Bill Bryson, who is President of Keep Britain Tidy.

Full article: Yorkshire Dales News: Litter costs close to £100 million

Author Bill Bryson gives award to Oswestry Keep Our Town Special anti-supermarket group « Shropshire Star

2010-07-20T09:30:00.000+01:00

Author Bill Bryson gives award to Oswestry Keep Our Town Special anti-supermarket group « Shropshire Star

Choose DVD Rental - Making Your Job Easier

2010-07-12T16:03:00.004+01:00

Bill Bryson's 'Notes From a Small Island' soon available to rent

The TV series of Bryson's 'notes from a small island' which features iconic British performers including Stephen Fry, Alexei Sayle and Victoria Wood should soon be available to rent.
Subscribers to DVD rental services such as Lovefilm and Blockbuster can already reserve the title online.
The series isn't a blow-by-blow retelling of the book though it does travel round the UK investigating iconic cultural landmarks such as the London Underground

'Thunderbolt Kid' Author Bill Bryson Captures Glee Of 1950s

2010-07-05T16:07:00.000+01:00

I never head out on a road trip without a vast array of audio books on the front seat. So last week, on my way to visit an old friend in Orlando, I included The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid in the stack. I’d heard this book once before and remembered laughing my head off at his take on America’s postwar baby boom. I found it just as hilarious the second time.

Full Review: 'Thunderbolt Kid' author Bill Bryson captures glee of 1950s

Telegraph Review - At Home: A History Of Private Life

2010-07-01T11:01:00.000+01:00

If Bill Bryson hadn’t already published a book called A Short History of Nearly Everything, the title would have done just as well for his new one. On the face of it, his subject matter may have narrowed a bit: from the entire universe to everyday life on Earth.

Full Article: At Home: a History of Private Life by Bill Bryson: review - Telegraph

Travel For A Living - Is It For You?

2010-06-28T10:19:00.001+01:00

Being able to travel extensively is a dream for many people, and it seems all the more appealing if your life is determined more by factors you can't really control. Your boss is in a foul mood most mornings when you get in to work? Your neighbours whisper behind your back because your lawn doesn't meet the standards of the neighbourhood? All your friends talk about is who will get a divorce next and who just bought a bigger car although he can't really afford it?

The idea to get away from it all and to be able to set your own time tables and priorities just seems the more appealing, the less control about the factors that determine your life you have. But few of us can afford to travel for months or years...

And if you make money writing to live off while you are traveling? The solution to your dilemma, a dream come true? Yes and no.

I have been traveling South America for some years, researching and writing travel guides. It was without any doubt the most exciting time of my life. Since I was traveling by myself it as easy to get to know new people and I am still in contact with some travelers from all over the world. I even met my husband on this trip and consequently came to live with him in Spain. I learned a lot of useful things, like not letting myself getting impressed by South American Machismo, standing up for myself, overcoming fears - in short: this trip changed my life in more than one way.

But there were downsides as well. You have to be able to motivate yourself, if you really want to make a living while you travel. There won't be a boss to tell you every minute of the day what you have to do. That is nice, of course, but you will still have to get things done, so you better get yourself organized. And you have to be prepared to put in more than the eight hours daily you would do at your job at home. As with anything you'll do freelancing you have to be willing to work hard - that's not really a problem though, because you will be doing something you love! At least, that's how it was for me.

I was traveling South America when using the Internet for most people meant writing emails. So every once in a while, when I was in a bigger city I found a place where you could use the Internet (for an exorbitant price usually) and wrote some emails to my family and friends. I didn't even know how to send an attachment, I mailed the discs with my texts via air mail to my publisher...

Since then things have changed a bit and the Internet has made the life of a travel writer a lot easier You don't have to have an editorial anymore, you can just publish your travel diary as a blog or at your website. If you want to make money with your texts though they have to stand out from the thousands of thousands of "have been there, have seen this, the weather is awesome, people are really nice" kind of travel blogs. You have to find your unique voice and you have to see the story behind the sight. " It was so wonderful that I can't really describe it" won't do. You have to be funny, or philosophical, or a great story teller, or best of all, a little bit of all. It is your very personal voice and your outlook on the things you encounter, that will motivate readers to come back for more. In short: you have to find your audience. Don't get me wrong: you don't have to be a Bruce Chatwin or a Bill Bryson to be successful as a travel blogger, but you have to find you voice.

And how do I make money from this? There are different possibilities to earn money form a travel blog: Affiliate programs, AdSense and the likes, advertising... In order to make money from your travel blog you have to treat it like a business. If you are new to blogging for money it won't hurt if you learn the basics. As in any business there are things you should know, technical stuff like setting up your blog, things like how to get the traffic, and, very important of course, how to make money with your blog.

This is where Travel Blog Success from David Lee comes in. It explains the basics, but it also helps the more experienced blogger to get things right and rolling.

Learn more about how to travel for a living and check out Travel Blog Success

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Bill Bryson Predicted 2010 Economic Gloom Back In The Eighties

2010-06-25T11:17:00.000+01:00

How prescient is this quote from Bill Bryson's Notes From a Small Island? "...When a nation's industrial prowess has plunged so low that it is reliant on Korean firms for its future economic security, then perhaps it is time to re-dress one's educational priorities and maybe give a little thought to what's going to put some food on the table in about 2010." Oh, if only a few politicians had read that. Second thoughts, they probably did and ignored it anyway.

"Notes From A Small Island" is a hilarious account of Bryson's adventures travelling across England in the 80s. In the chapter which inspired the above observation he has arrived in Oxford, befuddled by that town's obsessive academia. Discussing "post-Kantian aesthetics", he suggests, is not going to help a country which relies on foreign companies to employ British workers on British turf. He is talking about the new Samsung factory which had just opened in Tyneside and which was to provide 800 jobs for British workers at a time when unemployment was at record levels. Like many at the time, Bryson accurately predicted that this was the beginning of the end.

This current economic crisis is not the fault of the previous Labour government under Brown and Darling, but the long-standing industrial policy begun by 80s Thatcherism which destroyed British manufacturing and handed the vacant lot to foreign investors. Having reduced manufacturing in the UK to an insignificance, mighty powers were then handed to the money men in the City who proceeded to invent countless ways of making money without actually producing anything.

Many experts could see, even at its conception, that this policy was bound to end in tears for the majority of decent, hard-working people. The "good news" is it has provided the perfect opportunity for hundreds, if not thousands, of unscrupulous speculators to step forth and make millions, if not billions. The bad news is that the greed-mania this culture produced has brought the world to the brink of depression and condemned millions to working long years into retirement on low pay.

Bryson, like other pundits, saw the importance of making stuff at home. It is a shame that we are now so far from that world of "buying British" that we take it for granted most of the goods we bring home will have been produced in some far flung land. Now this trend is crystallising in the ascendancy of Chinese manufacturing. Politicians and economists cannot agree on what the long term fallout will be of handing so much of our trade to China. Word of note: one of the causes of the decline of the Roman Empire was obsessive trading with the east. Who says history doesn't repeat itself?

Milton Johanides is a retired businessman, church elder, writer and artist. He has been featured on BBC TVs Songs of Praise, owned numerous art galleries and once ran an award winning picture framing business in Scotland. The views expressed in these articles are his own. email: miltonjohanides@yahoo.co.uk

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