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Book review: Made in America December 3, 2006
This is more of Bryson from earlier in his career and still on kind of a linguistic academic jag rather than writing solely to be entertaining. Made in America follows the stories of various inventions by American inventors (e.g., our government, the airplane, the telephone, the personal computer, etc.) and discusses how they came about and what influences they had on the English language as spoken in America and other places.
Frankly, I could have done with more wild tales, apocryphal or otherwise, about the inventions and inventors and less discussions about how interior vowel sounds were dropped by this group and kept by this other completely uninteresting group over there. As I mentioned in my discussion of The Mother Tongue, this isn't Bryson at his best in my opinion. The book shines the most when he takes a detour from the linguistics stuff and talks about the bizarre qualities of the inventors themselves, like how Thomas Edison was a complete bastard in how he waged war against the competing alternating current (AC) electrical standard, even going so far as to stage a public execution by electricity to show how dangerous AC could be. Stuff like that or discussions of Benjamin Franklin's legendary randiness makes for more interesting and even more educational reading.
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Tags: Bill Bryson, Book Review, Nonfiction
