The lost continent : travels in small town America

"I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to".And, as soon as Bill Bryson was old enough, he left.

Des Moines couldn't hold him, but it did lure him back.

After ten years in England he returned to the land of his youth, and drove almost 14,000 miles in search of a mythical town called Amalgam, the kind of smiling village where the films of his youth were set.

Instead he drove through a series of horrific burgs which he renamed Smellville, Fartville, Coleslaw, Dead Squaw, Coma, Doldrum.

At best his search led him to Anywhere, USA; a lookalike strip of gas stations, motels and hamburger outlets populated by obese and slow-witted hicks with a partiality for synthetic fibres.

He found a continent that was doubly lost;lost to itself because blighted by greed, pollution, mobile homes and television; lost to him because he had become a foreigner in his own country.