"The kind of book Steinbeck might have written if he'd traveled with David Letterman." —New York magazine

An inspiring and hilarious account of one man's rediscovery of America and his search for the perfect small town.

Following an urge to rediscover his youth, Bill Bryson left his native Des Moines, Iowa, in a journey that would take him across 38 states. Lucky for us, he brought a notebook.

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Finalist for the PEN/USA Award in Creative Nonfiction, the Thurber Prize for American Humor, and the Audie Award in Biography/Memoir
This Random House Reader’s Circle edition includes a reading group guide and a conversation between Firoozeh Dumas and Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner!
“Remarkable . . . told with wry humor shorn of sentimentality . . . In the...

Author Bill Bryson tells the comical story of his return to America after living in England for two decades. When he returned stateside with his English wife and their four children, he was greeted by a whole new landscape which included microwave pancakes, twenty-four-hour dental floss hotlines-- and the thought that 3 million Americans believe they had been abducted by aliens at some point.

"Devastatingly handsome and insanely rich, Farrell Covington is capable of anything and impossible to resist. He's a clear-eyed romantic, an aesthete but not a snob, self-indulgent yet wildly generous. As the son of one of the country's most powerful and deeply conservative families, the world could be his. But when he falls for Nate Reminger, an aspiring writer from a nice Jewish family in Piscataway, New Jersey, the results are passionate and catastrophic....

"In the decades directly following the Holocaust, American Jewish leaders anxiously debated how to preserve and produce what they considered authentic Jewish culture, fearful that growing affluence and suburbanization threatened the future of Jewish life. Many communal educators and rabbis contended that without educational interventions, Judaism as they understood it would disappear altogether. They pinned their hopes on residential summer camps...

Looks at the remarkable men and women whose low-profile accomplishments contribute to the running of the nation, from coal miners and oil rig workers to migrant laborers and air traffic controllers.