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Bryson’s lancing wit is never more at home than when targeted at the American Way and the American Dream. He’s showed this before in his various books that focus his confusion in returning to his native land after a protracted stay in England.

“What Buddy Doberman and I discovered was that if you peed on Lincoln
Logs you bleached them white. As a result we created, over a period of
weeks, the world’s first albino Lincoln Log cabin, which we took to
school as part of a project on Abraham Lincoln’s early years.”

Here he harks back to a vivid memory of his childhood in Des Moines, Iowa - coloured with a boy’s exaggeration, but never overdone. He manages to evoke the American ’50s in great detail, not just the comforts and the ramping up of the quality of life for the average American, but the reasons behind this. As a postwar giant in domestic industry, the US exploded into consumer production and furnished reasonably average families, like the Bryson’s with exciting new worlds of domestic and leisure excess.

“… I saw the last of something really special. It’s something I seem to say a lot these days.”