Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe

He's Bill Bryson: it's going to be hilarious. I think the people who are taking offense to the book have forgotten that the voice he writes with is genuine and very much his own. Sure, the cities he visits and their inhabitants are portrayed as caricatures, but I'm just grateful he does not hesitate to make fun of himself either. If you're looking for a more comprehensive, lyrical version of Lonely Planet, look elsewhere.

Horrible book. He seems like a dirty old man to me with his comments. I got rid of the book after reading maybe 10 pages. Too much to read to continue a book I don't agree with. That's too bad too because I really liked "A Walk in the Woods."

Horrible book. He seems like a dirty old man to me with his comments. I got rid of the book after reading maybe 10 pages. Too much to read to continue a book I don't agree with. That's too bad too because I really liked "A Walk in the Woods."

I appreciate the author's sense of humor. I have been a tourist and I really disliked the French. I traveled with a mixture of ages and found the French were horrible to our young people..no money you see. The author is a brave man and made me laugh out loud. I will be reading more of his books.

Having read five of Bill Bryson's books (including the excellent, "A Walk in the Woods"), I was looking forward to this book. I traveled to Europe and Africa in 1971 for nearly six months when everyone was carrying the book "Europe on $5 a Day." I followed up with a short trip back to Europe in 1985 and then again many times years later. I was very interested in reading this book, since I had been to all the places Bill was writing about. e.g., even Sofia and Istanbul. This book was a major disapointment. Not very informative, interesting or FUNNY! There were some interesting facts, but usually just whinning and comments about how lousy a time he was having and all the unpleasant and unattractive people he encountered. I am sure all this was designed to make the book more readable and humorous, but I found practically nothing funny in this book. I guess you bomb out on a book every once and a while. Bryson appeared to be a self-centered, pissed off, ugly American traveler--the very ones he hated and mocked in his book.

I read "A Walk in the Woods" and loved it, so I thought this one would be good as well. I have traveled a lot in Europe and loved it. He has not much good to say about anyplace he visited. It's also not very funny. It sounds like he did it on the cheap and expects to have a beautiful hotel room and great meals. He really sounds like an ugly American and should just stay in Iowa.

This was the first book by Bill Bryson that I ever read, which started me on a long love-affair with the writer. I had the misfortune of reading this book mostly in public (during a trip), and I made a perfect fool of myself laughing out loud at times, sometimes literally with tears running down my cheeks. I'm sure people thought I was insane. So, do yourself a favor - buy this book immediately, but do read it in private. It is wonderful.

Bryson covers lots of cities and interactions with locals; his encounter with Austrians in a pub makes for chilling reading. The book is four stars rather than 5 because the light style encourages reading but the lack of maps, photos, and other exhibits prevents a 5-star award.

I enjoy the way Bryson tells a story, but this book was written
a quarter of a century ago. I kept wondering how much the places he described had changed in the intervening years. I can only imagine that Europe is much different today.

Bill Bryson is so funny, so perspicacious...reading Bryson on a train, (or on an unfortunate bus ride) while alone, leaves one vulnerable to looking maniacal with laughter. It is also hard to catch one's breath when gulping for air while wheezing with laughter.

Hilarious and informative, as always. It's twenty years since the book was written but Bryson's warts-and-all portrait of Europe retains every bit of it's charm and authenticity. Bill Bryson is just the best travel writer there is!

This guy "always" make me laugh out loud on my patio! Only problem is my neighbors think I'm Dr. Evil living in retirement! I've read 4 of his books so far and I've never been disappointed. Keep them coming, Bill!

When purchasing audiobooks, I normally follow a simple but very effective rule: never, never, never buy an audiobook read by the author. Even if the author is a talented writer, he/she is invariably a terrible narrator. Always look for audiobooks performed by experienced readers, as in Bryson's own "Notes From a Small Island" and "A Walk in the Woods", read by Ron Mclarty.

In Bryson's case I made a rare exception when I listened to "In a Sunburned Country" - the audio version had received reasonable reviews and his performance was indeed adequately entertaining. For this reason I assumed that "Neither Here Nor There" would be equally enjoyable. I was wrong. Bryson's deadpan monologue makes it sound as though he was bored out of his mind while reading this book. Passages that may have seemed amusing in the written version are herein delivered in a sleep-inducing monotone. The sardonically comedic talent he displayed in his reading of "In a Sunburned Country" is totally lacking. I would recommend this audiobook only as a cure for insomnia.

How the person who wrote "A Walk in the Woods" and "One Summer" could put his name on this material mystifies me. For a limp handful of amusing anecdotes, the reader endures pages of Bill Bryson's rants, whining, inappropriate sexual comments, insults, and smug superiority. This material in no way constitutes a travelogue; this is the work of an immature adolescent male who sees himself, not his subject matter, at the center of the world. Huge disappointment.

To clarify, if at all possible, I would give this travelogue 2.5 stars, as its relentlessly obtuse narration keeps it from full 3 star success.

In the words of Bryson himself, "I don't hold grudges, except against Richard Nixon," and usually I am of the same ilk. However, I must begrudge Mr. Bryson for the repetitive structure of his writing. Each town seems to follow this pattern: curmudgeonly grumbling about the price of goods and services, complaints about food, redemption through long walks, and consumption of coffee, beer, and/or nicotine. Perhaps it is because that I hold Bryson's other works in such high esteem that I am so critical of Neither Here Nor There . But this work seemed to drag endlessly along, as if I were stuck in some slow paced European train compartment that Bryson so frequently finds himself in.

Perhaps this work would function better as an introduction to Bryson's oeuvre, as the expectations would not be set as high. There were certainly some acerbically witty and, dare I say, laugh out loud moments, such as when he observes that the "Germans have this annoying characteristic of starting land wars". Many other reviewers complained that his appraisal of each destination bordered on bigotry and was at the very least firmly ensconced in ethnocentrism. Although moments of the text did come off that way, it must be remembered that Bryson easily skewers his own culture in the same way, so I forgive him of this folly, if you want to even call it that.

If you have read others in the Bryson collection, I would pass on this work, as you will be left disappointed and longing for his meanderings on the Appalachian trail. However, if you are unfamiliar with his writing, go ahead and give it the "good ole' college try," in my humble opinion.

I've read a lot of Bryson, but over many decades, so it's difficult for me to rank this book in his curriculum vitae. With so many reviews, mine will be a spit in the ocean, but I wished to point out something not often mentioned in the reviews---that Bryson was a very discriminating traveller and human being, especially with regard to visual impact. Whether cathedrals or government buildings were excrescences or masterpieces, Bryson could in a very few words describe what was right or what was wrong. And his humor works for me---it almost never makes me cringe. If you read British travel writers, like Peter Fleming, say, I personally could often fire the books through a plate-glass window.

Self-deprecation is a very, very difficult stylistic theme to use with mastery. I wish Bryson didn't use it at all, but his percentage of using it effectively is better than most.

As a collector of travel literature, I have been aware of Bryson for years. I have avoided buying his books, however, based on a presumption that they were rather shallow, albeit humorous. I broke down and finally bought this as my first. My presumptions wee correct.

Bryson had toured Europe as a young man in the early 70s with a friend. Years later he attempts to reprise that trip by himself. The book alternates in time between the two journeys. Bryson is funny, almost relentlessly so. He does manage some true wit, but you have to suffer a lot of potty humor in the meantime. He does not dwell much on the history, culture or cuisine of the places he visits. He revels in his linguistic ignorance. Much of the book is spent on humorous encounters with locals and observations based on obvious cultural stereotypes.

As a traveler, Bryson is basically a curmudgeon. In this respect he is like Paul Theroux. Theroux, however, writes with intelligence and insight. Bryson reaches for the obvious joke. Bryson writes well and is entertaining; however, reading him is like eating fast food

In theology, we call it a 'calling.' A vocation. The perfect match between your greatest love and the work for which you are most well-suited or which God or the Universe has called you to do. Bill Bryson describes his travels in Europe with that sort of passion. But add to that, not only his talent for conveying information, but also his characteristic sense of humor, his ability to describe the things he observes down to the minutest detail, his exquisite writing style, the way he paints so delicately, so specifically with words, and above all, his love, his love of all he experiences. Bill Bryson is the perfect travel companion. I, for one, am disabled and don’t see myself boarding a plane or train or bus anytime soon, let alone walking miles and miles, as Bryson does. But through this author’s words, I take wing as a reader and fly with Bryson. He makes me laugh so often; he also makes me cry; he makes me share his passion. He eats and drinks a lot throughout his travels in Europe. He also shares his admiration for beautiful women. But his most endearing quality for me is his honesty. He pulls no punches when he describes the qualities of the countrymen he encounters in the various nations through which he travels. But he also laughs at himself and often makes a fool of himself. He is no exception to the rule which he, himself, establishes. But with such keen intellect and such sheer artistry, he paints the entire picture in such an exquisite way. It is no wonder that Bryson is such a popular writer. I read the Audible version of this book. That is, I listened to it rather than reading it with my eyes. Bill Bryson was the narrator, and oh my God, what a narrator! He hypnotizes and charms the reader/listener with his beautiful voice, the way he veers between tenderness, admiration, and sarcasm. This has got to be one of my all-time favorite books. An illuminating history of Europe, as seen through the eyes of a modern traveler, a keen thinker, an immoderate drinker, a gourmand, an art connoisseur, a nature lover, a humorist, an isolationist, an awe-inspirer, a tickler, and a sharer of all he experiences, throughout the spectrum of physical, emotional, and intellectual. I love Bill Bryson. Period.

Whether you’re thinking of traveling to Europe on $5 or $5,000 a day, this is the book you first have to read to prepare for your trip – and possibly re-think it. Whether you’re a casual tourist or – as I once was – a SERIOUS student, this is the book you first have to read. I wish I’d possessed Bill Bryson’s sense of humor during the decade I spent in pre-post-graduate studies at several universities and language institutes in Western Europe and the (then-) Soviet Union, but I didn’t. Instead, I had to wait almost 30+ years to learn what I obviously never missed by not going to Lichtenstein – and I can honestly say that I’ve never had a more enjoyably vicarious non-experience or un-urge to take (in) a Valduz.

This is the third work of Bill Bryson’s I’ve read (the other two being the monumental A SHORT HISTORY OF NEARLY EVERYTHING and the quite amusing A WALK IN THE WOODS), and I suspect that Bryson is going to turn out to be my favorite (English-language) non-fiction writer. Yes, he’s that good. Why more textbooks for American high schoolers aren’t written by folks like Bill Bryson is a mystery to me, although I suspect that public school boards wouldn’t know what to do with the certain revolution in learning that might result – namely, that most kids would look at most parents and teachers and think Why can’t you think, talk and write a little more like Bill Bryson and little less like yourselves?

As if to underscore my point, Bryson has this to say on p. 64 about why he learned (or at least retained) virtually nothing from his junior high school French courses: “How often on a visit to France do you need to tell someone you want to clean a blackboard? How frequently do you wish to say: ‘It is winter. Soon it will be spring.’ In my experience, people know this already.”

Litotes – or understatement – is a literary device Bryson excels at, quite possibly thanks to his nearly two decades in the U. K. And although this book is primarily about traveling in Europe and rendering observations of – and judgments on – things Continental, Bryson is not too bewildered or bewitched by the mystique of the Olde World to deprive us of some of his more New Worldly nuggets, almost all of which are couched in what I’ll call, respectfully and affectionately, “Bryson-speak.”

As an example, we find on p. 66: “(t)o my mind, the only possible pet is a cow. Cows love you. They are harmless, they look nice, they don’t need a box to crap in, they keep the grass down, and they are so trusting and stupid that you can’t help but lose your heart to them. Where I live in Yorkshire, there’s a herd of cows down the lane. You can stand by the wall at any hour of the day or night, and after a minute the cows will all waddle over and stand with you, much too stupid to know what to do next, but happy just to be with you. They will stand there all day, as far as I can tell, possibly till the end of time. They will listen to your problems and never ask a thing in return. They will be your friends forever. And when you get tired of them, you can kill them and eat them. Perfect.”

‘Sounds a bit like my idea of an ideal girlfriend – except, perhaps, for that last bit.

But back to Europe and things quaintly European, Bryson observes on p. 68 that “I have been told more than once that one of the more trying things about learning to live with the Germans after the war was having to watch them return with their wives and girlfriends to show off the places they had helped to ruin.”

Ah, yes. The Olde World. Makes one downright grateful to have been born in the New – unless, of course, one was summarily called to task in Vietnam.

And I suppose Bryson’s two-decade residency in the U. K. also permits him to make this rather bold (not to say impertinent) observation on p. 145: “(t)he town [Sorrento, Italy] was full of middle-aged English tourists having an off-season holiday (i.e., one they could afford). Wisps of conversation floated to me across the tables and from couples passing on the sidewalk. It was always the same. The wife would be in noisemaking mode, that incessant, pointless, mildly fretful chatter that overtakes Englishwomen in midlife. ‘I was going to get tights today and I forgot. I asked you to remind me, Gerald. These ones have a ladder in them from here to Amalfi. I suppose I can get tights here. I haven’t a clue what size to ask for. I knew I should have packed an extra pair….’ Gerald was never listening to any of this, of course, because he was secretly ogling a braless beauty leaning languorously on a lamppost and trading quips with some hoods on Vespas, and appeared to be aware of his wife only as a mild, chronic irritant on the fringe of his existence. Everywhere I went in Sorrento I kept seeing these English couples, the wife looking critically at everything, as if she were working undercover for the Ministry of Sanitation, the husband dragging along behind her, worn and defeated.”

Bryson has no particular bone to pick with Brits, however, as we see from an equally trenchant observation about some of our own, delivered with equal parts pith and punch, just a few pages earlier. While touring (solo) the Vatican City in Rome, he spotted and hitched up with an American tour group, but was quickly spotted and discarded “because I wasn’t wearing a baseball cap and warm-up jacket and trousers in one of the livelier primary colors.”

The French have a lively (and accurate) little aphorism: “personne n’est prophète chez soi.” Perhaps it’s time someone in some language came up with a suitable way to describe your run-of-the-mill mass tourist – as in, “a tourist is never more lame and out of step than when he or she is on tour.” If this sounds both vaguely tautological and roundly condemnatory of the species ex situ, it’s meant to.

But before we leave Sorrento for parts unknown, Bryson treats us to a smidgen of what much of his SHORT HISTORY is all about – in short: here today, gone tomorrow. Some part of Calabria could blow (once again) at any time. And when it does, it’s hasta la vista, baby.

Let it never be said, by the way, that Bryson is above a product placement. On p. 185, after an exasperating experience inside a Union Bank of Switzerland office in Geneva to get some replacement travelers’ checks (for those that had been stolen by a gypsy posing as a child posing as a gypsy in Florence), we find: “(b)ut from now on it’s American Express travelers’ checks for me, boy, and if the company wishes to acknowledge this unsolicited endorsement with a set of luggage or a skiing holiday in the Rockies, then let the record show that I am ready to take it.”

Of course, Bill Bryson is a writer of unimpeachable ethics. And so, on p. 196, we have the following: “Perhaps the people at the hotel just didn’t like the look of me, or maybe they correctly suspected that I was a travel writer and would reveal to the world the secret that the food at the Vaduzerhof Hotel at number 3 Stadtlestrasse in Vaduz is Not Very Good. Who can say?”

The potential reader of NEITHER HERE NOR THERE will, I trust, allow me the inclusion of a lengthy paragraph from p. 201 to this already lengthy review, but only because I find it so compelling. “One of my first vivid impressions of Europe was a Walt Disney movie I saw as a boy. I believe it was called The Trouble with Angels. It was a hopelessly sentimental fictionalized account of how a group of cherry-cheeked boys with impish instincts and voices like angels made their way into the Vienna Boys’ Choir. I enjoyed the film hugely, being hopelessly sentimental myself, but what made a lasting indent on me was the European-ness of the movie background – the cobbled streets, the toytown cars, the corner shops with a tinkling bell above the door, the modest, lived-in homeyness of each boy’s familial flat. It all seemed so engaging and agreeably old-fashioned compared with the sleek and modern world I knew, and it left me with the unshakable impression that Austria was somehow more European than the rest of Europe. And so it seemed here in Innsbruck. For the fist time in a long while, certainly for the first time on this trip, I felt a palpable sense of wonder to find myself here, on these streets, in this body, at this time. I was in Europe now. It was an oddly profound notion.”

“Austria was somehow more European than the rest of Europe” indeed! – as we discover on just the next page when Bryson and Katz (his erstwhile traveling companion here, but also in A WALK IN THE WOODS), discover what’s being said about them by a couple of local yokels. In fact, it’s not until the squalor of Sophia (on p. 238) that Bryson “…realized with a sense of profound unease the Europe I had dreamed of as a child.”

One parting note by way of exit from this review… If Bill Bryson’s no-longer-so-youthful traveling experience is any reliable indicator, you now have a better idea of how the Western world was won, lost, and won again on the strength of many dreams, fantasies, erections, demolitions – and three essential lubricants: beer, wine and coffee. While the first two might well have given, uh, rise to the dreams, fantasies & Co., it’s clearly the last of these that keeps us in Wheaties. Lord help us if the bean farmers and pickers of the developing world ever decide to cut off our supply!

RRB
11/12/14
Brooklyn, NY

Journey with Bill Bryson as he makes his way through Europe. He meets up with local people and learns much more than he probably expected. The portraits of cities and European people are vivid. The author is also drawn to meeting up with some European girls during the trip, though this turns out to be more of an aspirational goal rather than a real one. Bryson's wit is rarely outdone by any other travel writer. His recollections of an earlier vacation during his college years is just the beginning of this laugh-inducing book. A must-have for new tourists to Europe, or for experienced ones.
I enjoyed this first as the print version, and then later as the audiobook. It could be time for a third go-through. Just fantastic ... like Bryson's other travel writing.

I love Bill Bryson. I own most of his books (including this one). However, this isn't one of my favorites of his. I recently re-read this immediately after re-reading In A Sunburned Country and the differences are stark. In A Sunburned Country, I really felt like I got a feel for Australia - its history, its struggles, its triumphs, along with a sense of the different cities. However, in Neither Here nor There, it does really feel like the book lives up to its title - it's a bit all over the place. I never really got a sense of each city he visited. The book reads more like "I went here and saw this and then went there and saw that", without a lot of the typical Bryson narrative that truly gives you a feel for the place. I can tell you nothing about the countries he visited and barely anything about the cities - no context is provided, no history, so each of the places he visits just blur into the next. Some of the critiques he makes of one city somehow enlighten the next - Amsterdam's trash is grim and depressing, but Rome's is invigorating and reminiscent of New York? The references to sex are a little weird, not the prostitutes mentioned in the cities, but Bryson's mentions of his own fantasies - it's a little strange to hear a man in his 60's talking about the cheerleaders he fantasized about in high school about with their "pert young bottoms" - it's a strange level of detail that takes you right out of thinking about Europe. Skip this one and read any of his others - In A Sunburned Country is fantastic, At Home is wonderful, A Short History of Nearly Everything is great - any of the ones he's written where he adds a little history to contextualize the sights he sees.

The Glass is almost always half full. I love Bryson's humor, and I have personally traveled to most of the places that the author has traveled, but he's always commenting on the dark side and how rotten each place is, instead of appreciating that it's different and making the best of what seemed to mostly always be a bad situation in everywhere he visited. Based on this book, I wouldn't want to visit 80% of the places he went to. He seemed sour grapes. Love his humorous descriptions & tirades, but he seems like a grumpy old man. Most all these places are better than he describes. The world is fun to explore.

His attitude is a bit pessimistic but the locations are interesting and, most importantly, he's a really good writer. Here's what I mean:

"The hotel was one of those sterile, modern places that always put me in mind of a hospital, but at least it didn't have the curious timer switches that used to be a feature of hotel hallways in France. ... All the light switches in the hallways were timed to go off after 10 or 15 seconds, presumably as an economy measure. This wasn't so bad if your room was next to the elevator, but if it was very far down the hall, and hotel hallways in Paris tend to wander around like an old man with Alzheimer's, you would generally proceed the last furlong in total blackness, feeling your way along the walls woth flattened palms, and invariably colliding scrotally with the corner of a 19th century oak table put there, evidently, for that purpose." pg. 40

This book was a bit better than I'd usually rate at three stars, but not quite good enough to justify four stars. I have problems with it similar to the problems I had with "The Lost Continent", the account of Bryson's travels through the U.S.A., although not quite as severe as the problems I had with that book. He has a tendency to be complaining out of both sides of his mouth; if a location does not have fine enough accommodations, he will complain about that fact. But if it is too sleek and well-accoutred, he will accuse it of being too touristy, and complain about that instead. In this book, at least (unlike in The Lost Continent) there does seem to be a middle ground that he finds charming, but still, too many of his complaints seem mean-spirited and exaggerated for the sake of humor. Much better travel books by Bryson include "A Walk In The Woods" and "A Sunburned Country", in which he describes, respectively, his attempts to walk the Appalachian Trail, and his travels in Australia.

Bill Bryson is a gifted writer, able to weave laugh-out-loud humor with poignant rhapsodizing while tossing off tirades against changes that have conspired together to ruin America or the world in general. "Neither Here Nor There: Travels in Europe" manages to include all three as Bryson retraces steps he took as a college student in the 1970s and backpacks across Europe twenty years later in an effort to relive those days and to see what has changed, or sometimes, what hasn't. It is a riotous mix of laughter and good times but more often than not a candid look at the problems facing Europe (in the early 1990s) and the problems of the tourism industry.

Byrson begins his travels in Hammerfest, the northernmost point in Norway during the frozen winter months, so that he can observe the Northern Lights. From there, Bryson moves in a zigzag south and north, ranging from Paris to Belgium to Germany to Sweden to Italy to Eastern Europe to end in Istanbul. At each place Bryson comments upon the beauty (or lack of) in the local landscape and architecture, spends his time wandering town centers and interesting museums, in search of good food, good beer, and good times. Overall he is successful, his twenty years from the first journey to this one making him a wiser man who has learned a thing or two about the world and isn't easily swept away by sights he saw the first time around. Mixed in with Bryson's current observations are reminiscences about his first trip with his friend Stephen Katz and memories of his life growing up in Iowa. Bryson offers many laugh-out-loud moments, like his wonderings about sex dolls in Hamburg to his belief that cows are the perfect pets. But he also offers up some sad but true observations about how we live: "We used to build civilizations. Now we build shopping malls" (page 105). We build without beauty and with no need to last.

"Neither Here Nor There" is a delightful journey with a witty and observant tour guide. At times, Bryson's wanderings seem redundant - at each new place there is a hotel room to be acquired, museums to visit, digressions to make - but being that he takes readers to places they may never have been before, it is a welcome diversion. Just as with "The Lost Continent," Bryson's book about traveling small town America with the hope of finding the perfect small town, Bryson tries to find that idealized European village that existed in his childhood imagination from movies he watched. He finds it in the most unlikely of towns in the least visited country, a village seemingly untouched by Western influence. But that was over twenty years ago. It's time Bryson took the trip again.

....and after twenty years it hasn't lost its power to make me laugh out loud. Ok, folks, don't take any of it too seriously; it's satire - just enjoy it! If tears of laughter don't course down your cheeks when reading his experiences at Spa - then I'm not sure why you'd even bother with this book. He has a marvelous sense of humor, *THE* veneer for statements that under another pen would be eyebrow-raising at best or downright offensive at worst. Let's just say he's mostly wrong most of the time; just an opinionated generalizer, happy to stay so.

Bryson went to Europe pre-disposed to find proof for all the stereotypical and universal views many already have about "foreigners" and make the most of them to fill this book. The French are rude, the Germans humorless, the Italians anarchic, volatile and disorganized and so on, and so on...Personally, I could tell you that the French are kind, helpful and very polite. That the Germans I've met in Germany are exceptionally eager to make you feel at home...and that Italians are my favorite people, but so what? Bill Bryson is a stand-up comic who uses the written word for his stage performance perhaps because he can reach a wider audience while staying safely out of tomatoes' reach this way. You instinctively know he's the one "innocent abroad" Mark Twain forgot to take along.

But if you take him seriously, then Bryson is the dumbest schmuck ever to set foot outside his comfort zone without a chaperone!

Why would anyone?

Certainly not Bryson at his best. In this book he complains his way around Europe as only an American can, while also revisiting memories of backpacking around the place as a younger man (with Katz). Still it's enjoyable to read - there are moments of levity and Bryson's wit is as acerbic as ever. The book is also very dated in that it was written in 1990. Europe is a much changed place since then. I felt particularly heartbroken as he described his visit to Yugoslavia, which would be torn to bits in a bloody war a couple years after he published the book. I only read this book because for some reason I'd never read it despite having read all his other books. I don't regret it - it was a nice appetizer while I await his new book about Britain. But alas, it's not one of his best.

After reading some of the worst reviews, I decided to check the book out of the library to see if there was any truth to them. I am guessing those reviewers are from those countries or are young. Anyone who has backpacked around Europe in their 20s pre-internet days and then revisited the continent in their 30s or 40s know how much your experience changes. You see things differently as you age. People view and treat you differently. Countries have changed as communism collapsed, democracies developed, and economies have been on a roller coaster. He is completely correct when he talks about how being a tourist nowadays is worse than decades ago. He still finds the humor in each place he visits. When I retell my stories of being pickpocketed in Barcelona, beg bugs in the hostel in Poland, etc., I still remember my trips fondly. Travelers expect that; vacationers are the ones who get upset about it. If you enjoy Bryson's humor, you will like this book too.
p.s. To the one star reviewer who got upset that he called waiting on tables an inferior job, I waited on tables in college. Get over it. It is not a high skilled job anyone should devote his/her life to.

Bryson seems to me, the kind of guy that leaves his umbrella at home only to be caught in a downpour. Only then, to vehemently chastise the weather man for listing a 90% chance of precipitation rather than one hundred. It was only drizzling when he left the house; how was he supposed to know it wasn’t going to clear up to be the most beautiful day in the history of mankind?

He fancies himself some sort of egregiously gregarious world traveler, with maps to show for his overwhelmingly cultured soul. They’re Swiss, after all, and written in German (how eclectic, though he hates Germans), though he’s the first to point out that he prefers to have no knowledge of foreign languages. He’s a true pessimist, a vocable showman by trade, and unfortunately, is the very reason I am $15 poorer and 15 times more an aggrieved reader. Buyer beware.

He’s the kind of guy that complains about cold in Oslo, rain in London and fog in San Francisco. That is, when he is actually in America, his homeland, for which he rebukes as boring, ugly and uncultured. An Iowan by birth, he considers himself a true Briton; and authenticates such a claim with a wife, proclivity for port wines, and a verbose tale of misfortune throughout the world, that is Neither Here nor There, primarily to exhibit his oh-so grandiose diction. He speaks the King’s language, you know, not some demoralized offshoot known as "American English,” understood better by cavemen than scholars.

He’ll gripe about too many flies atop a fresh pile of cow dung, or a tour guide for never shutting up. He denounces natives for their own ways of living, calls out the failures in every aspect of any city he visits and bickers that roads are designated for cars, could you believe it, and not for him, a pedestrian. I will admit, however, there were a number of passages that made me laugh, in a cynically comedic kind of way, but for the most part, he piqued my curiosity as to why he’d ever left Iowa in the first place.

He’s the kind of person that complains about his deplorable friends, as if he has no other choice, and will cast hope for mishap upon even a little old nun. Were you to honor him with adherence to such sagacious advice, his stories will make you bypass an attraction you’ve always wanted to see, skip entire cities deemed undeserving, or downright cancel your outbound flight for a journey you’ve waited years for and declare, “screw it, I’m staying in Iowa."

I have read or listened to most of Bill Bryson's works and I am a huge fan. He is definitely in my top five authors and will read anything he writes.

I experienced this as an audio book. I was immediately concerned because the author does not read it himself, as he does with most if not all of the others (all of them that I have listened to). In hindsight, I wonder if he wanted to distance himself from this work. The humor, while funny at times, is cruder and unapologetically more mean spirited toward certain groups than in other works. It's the first Bryson book I would not recommend to or have wanted to read/listen to with my kids.

The reader/performer was clearly a talented, dynamic guy and not unpleasant to listen to. But his lilting voice inflections and mispronunciations did not do justice to Bryson's drier style of writing, or comport with my familiarity with Bryson's other readings, I had a hard time connecting the presentation with Bryson's voice.

I am not saying "steer clear," but the tone is just a little different than what makes Bryson great.

I found this to be one boring waste of time. I loved his book on 1927, Home, and SHort History…all great and liked Small Island..but this was a dud. His trip to Rome was like Mr. Stupid goes to Europe. He pays a Cab big bucks to get to his hotel 2 min. walking from the train station? And has not the smarts to know the gypsy scam…and not saavy enough to put his Checks where they can't be easily taken away by a child? His comments on the art and history of Rome are shallow. He doesn't know how to care for himself in the most basic ways, like taking some snacks or protein bars with him for just the sort of situations he always ends up in. This is just pathetic. He makes Rick Steves look like a genius. Read some Robert Hughes if you want depth on Rome. The Eternal City was wasted on Bryson. Also avoid the Appalachian Trail book...or as I call it; Bill's Travels with a Clown. And now they made a film of that book with Redford at 75 playing Bill at 40 something. I guess success means quality sinks in proportion to the bucks brought in.

Having lived in the Netherlands for ten years, I found this book amusing and interesting. I had experienced a lot of what I read or knew the areas quite well, as author Bill Bryson told his humorous tales.At first I wondered why he did this without his wife and then realized it was to gather information for the book. This choice to go alone probably gave us better insight on his travels, as it was about his adventures rather than a family experience.

It would take me reams of paper to tell the best parts of this book, because it is all good, and funny. I don't laugh at many books but I had tears in my eyes with some of the exploits I read about. Even to buying souvenirs Mr. Bryson made it a amusing situation, such as buying crucifix corn- on- the- cob holders or a Musical Last Supper toilet paper holder from shops in the Vatican City. Equally amusing was his rendition of using the Italian-English phrases in Fodor's guide to Italy. Not to spoil your fun, I won't elaborate, but run out and buy this book, now in reprint form. While you are at it, buy several copies for gifts for those of your friends and relatives who want to, wanted to, or will travel to Europe. Bill Bryson's Neither Here Nor There is the perfect book for armchair traveling.

In this book, Bill Bryson embarks on the grown-up version of backpacking across Europe. Having wandered Europe twenty years previously with a friend named Katz, he revisited some places and observes how they have changed.

Bryson has the idea of starting at Hammerfest, in far northern Norway, and then working his way south to Rome. Because he wants to see the northern lights, his journeys begin in winter, when the Arctic is still dark and, of course, cold. The northern lights don't appear to him for a couple of weeks, so the book begins at a leisurely pace, with Bryson hanging out in a dark, cold city where there really isn't much for a tourist to do.

Moving south from Hammerfest gives Bryson many cold, rainy days in Copenhagen and Stockholm before he can't take it any more and goes to Italy. From there he hops from one city to another, ending in Sofia, Bulgaria. His slower pace in the first part of the book gave him many opportunities to talk about the people in each place; in Italy, his observations tend to focus on the physical plant instead. When he gets to Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, however, his observations tun personal again.

Oddly enough, Bryson's most pithy observations are about the people but he doesn't spend much time meeting them. He comes across as a loner who is happiest wandering the streets of an unfamiliar city, visiting the museums, and then having a large number of beers at the end of the day. That strategy means that he risks making unfamiliar generalizations about the people around him, so it's remarkable that his observations don't necessarily jibe with the stereotypes. However, he doesn't pass up a stereotype if he can make a good joke.

Bryson is at his best when on the road less-traveled, from Hammerfest to Sofia, and he doesn't have much to say about the Romes of the world. He's a gifted writer, and it's a pleasure to accompany him.

His attitude is a bit pessimistic but the locations are interesting and, most importantly, he's a really good writer. Here's what I mean:

"The hotel was one of those sterile, modern places that always put me in mind of a hospital, but at least it didn't have the curious timer switches that used to be a feature of hotel hallways in France. ... All the light switches in the hallways were timed to go off after 10 or 15 seconds, presumably as an economy measure. This wasn't so bad if your room was next to the elevator, but if it was very far down the hall, and hotel hallways in Paris tend to wander around like an old man with Alzheimer's, you would generally proceed the last furlong in total blackness, feeling your way along the walls woth flattened palms, and invariably colliding scrotally with the corner of a 19th century oak table put there, evidently, for that purpose." pg. 40

This book was a bit better than I'd usually rate at three stars, but not quite good enough to justify four stars. I have problems with it similar to the problems I had with "The Lost Continent", the account of Bryson's travels through the U.S.A., although not quite as severe as the problems I had with that book. He has a tendency to be complaining out of both sides of his mouth; if a location does not have fine enough accommodations, he will complain about that fact. But if it is too sleek and well-accoutred, he will accuse it of being too touristy, and complain about that instead. In this book, at least (unlike in The Lost Continent) there does seem to be a middle ground that he finds charming, but still, too many of his complaints seem mean-spirited and exaggerated for the sake of humor. Much better travel books by Bryson include "A Walk In The Woods" and "A Sunburned Country", in which he describes, respectively, his attempts to walk the Appalachian Trail, and his travels in Australia.

Bill Bryson is a gifted writer, able to weave laugh-out-loud humor with poignant rhapsodizing while tossing off tirades against changes that have conspired together to ruin America or the world in general. "Neither Here Nor There: Travels in Europe" manages to include all three as Bryson retraces steps he took as a college student in the 1970s and backpacks across Europe twenty years later in an effort to relive those days and to see what has changed, or sometimes, what hasn't. It is a riotous mix of laughter and good times but more often than not a candid look at the problems facing Europe (in the early 1990s) and the problems of the tourism industry.

Byrson begins his travels in Hammerfest, the northernmost point in Norway during the frozen winter months, so that he can observe the Northern Lights. From there, Bryson moves in a zigzag south and north, ranging from Paris to Belgium to Germany to Sweden to Italy to Eastern Europe to end in Istanbul. At each place Bryson comments upon the beauty (or lack of) in the local landscape and architecture, spends his time wandering town centers and interesting museums, in search of good food, good beer, and good times. Overall he is successful, his twenty years from the first journey to this one making him a wiser man who has learned a thing or two about the world and isn't easily swept away by sights he saw the first time around. Mixed in with Bryson's current observations are reminiscences about his first trip with his friend Stephen Katz and memories of his life growing up in Iowa. Bryson offers many laugh-out-loud moments, like his wonderings about sex dolls in Hamburg to his belief that cows are the perfect pets. But he also offers up some sad but true observations about how we live: "We used to build civilizations. Now we build shopping malls" (page 105). We build without beauty and with no need to last.

"Neither Here Nor There" is a delightful journey with a witty and observant tour guide. At times, Bryson's wanderings seem redundant - at each new place there is a hotel room to be acquired, museums to visit, digressions to make - but being that he takes readers to places they may never have been before, it is a welcome diversion. Just as with "The Lost Continent," Bryson's book about traveling small town America with the hope of finding the perfect small town, Bryson tries to find that idealized European village that existed in his childhood imagination from movies he watched. He finds it in the most unlikely of towns in the least visited country, a village seemingly untouched by Western influence. But that was over twenty years ago. It's time Bryson took the trip again.

....and after twenty years it hasn't lost its power to make me laugh out loud. Ok, folks, don't take any of it too seriously; it's satire - just enjoy it! If tears of laughter don't course down your cheeks when reading his experiences at Spa - then I'm not sure why you'd even bother with this book. He has a marvelous sense of humor, *THE* veneer for statements that under another pen would be eyebrow-raising at best or downright offensive at worst. Let's just say he's mostly wrong most of the time; just an opinionated generalizer, happy to stay so.

Bryson went to Europe pre-disposed to find proof for all the stereotypical and universal views many already have about "foreigners" and make the most of them to fill this book. The French are rude, the Germans humorless, the Italians anarchic, volatile and disorganized and so on, and so on...Personally, I could tell you that the French are kind, helpful and very polite. That the Germans I've met in Germany are exceptionally eager to make you feel at home...and that Italians are my favorite people, but so what? Bill Bryson is a stand-up comic who uses the written word for his stage performance perhaps because he can reach a wider audience while staying safely out of tomatoes' reach this way. You instinctively know he's the one "innocent abroad" Mark Twain forgot to take along.

But if you take him seriously, then Bryson is the dumbest schmuck ever to set foot outside his comfort zone without a chaperone!

Why would anyone?

Certainly not Bryson at his best. In this book he complains his way around Europe as only an American can, while also revisiting memories of backpacking around the place as a younger man (with Katz). Still it's enjoyable to read - there are moments of levity and Bryson's wit is as acerbic as ever. The book is also very dated in that it was written in 1990. Europe is a much changed place since then. I felt particularly heartbroken as he described his visit to Yugoslavia, which would be torn to bits in a bloody war a couple years after he published the book. I only read this book because for some reason I'd never read it despite having read all his other books. I don't regret it - it was a nice appetizer while I await his new book about Britain. But alas, it's not one of his best.

After reading some of the worst reviews, I decided to check the book out of the library to see if there was any truth to them. I am guessing those reviewers are from those countries or are young. Anyone who has backpacked around Europe in their 20s pre-internet days and then revisited the continent in their 30s or 40s know how much your experience changes. You see things differently as you age. People view and treat you differently. Countries have changed as communism collapsed, democracies developed, and economies have been on a roller coaster. He is completely correct when he talks about how being a tourist nowadays is worse than decades ago. He still finds the humor in each place he visits. When I retell my stories of being pickpocketed in Barcelona, beg bugs in the hostel in Poland, etc., I still remember my trips fondly. Travelers expect that; vacationers are the ones who get upset about it. If you enjoy Bryson's humor, you will like this book too.
p.s. To the one star reviewer who got upset that he called waiting on tables an inferior job, I waited on tables in college. Get over it. It is not a high skilled job anyone should devote his/her life to.

Bryson seems to me, the kind of guy that leaves his umbrella at home only to be caught in a downpour. Only then, to vehemently chastise the weather man for listing a 90% chance of precipitation rather than one hundred. It was only drizzling when he left the house; how was he supposed to know it wasn’t going to clear up to be the most beautiful day in the history of mankind?

He fancies himself some sort of egregiously gregarious world traveler, with maps to show for his overwhelmingly cultured soul. They’re Swiss, after all, and written in German (how eclectic, though he hates Germans), though he’s the first to point out that he prefers to have no knowledge of foreign languages. He’s a true pessimist, a vocable showman by trade, and unfortunately, is the very reason I am $15 poorer and 15 times more an aggrieved reader. Buyer beware.

He’s the kind of guy that complains about cold in Oslo, rain in London and fog in San Francisco. That is, when he is actually in America, his homeland, for which he rebukes as boring, ugly and uncultured. An Iowan by birth, he considers himself a true Briton; and authenticates such a claim with a wife, proclivity for port wines, and a verbose tale of misfortune throughout the world, that is Neither Here nor There, primarily to exhibit his oh-so grandiose diction. He speaks the King’s language, you know, not some demoralized offshoot known as "American English,” understood better by cavemen than scholars.

He’ll gripe about too many flies atop a fresh pile of cow dung, or a tour guide for never shutting up. He denounces natives for their own ways of living, calls out the failures in every aspect of any city he visits and bickers that roads are designated for cars, could you believe it, and not for him, a pedestrian. I will admit, however, there were a number of passages that made me laugh, in a cynically comedic kind of way, but for the most part, he piqued my curiosity as to why he’d ever left Iowa in the first place.

He’s the kind of person that complains about his deplorable friends, as if he has no other choice, and will cast hope for mishap upon even a little old nun. Were you to honor him with adherence to such sagacious advice, his stories will make you bypass an attraction you’ve always wanted to see, skip entire cities deemed undeserving, or downright cancel your outbound flight for a journey you’ve waited years for and declare, “screw it, I’m staying in Iowa."

I have read or listened to most of Bill Bryson's works and I am a huge fan. He is definitely in my top five authors and will read anything he writes.

I experienced this as an audio book. I was immediately concerned because the author does not read it himself, as he does with most if not all of the others (all of them that I have listened to). In hindsight, I wonder if he wanted to distance himself from this work. The humor, while funny at times, is cruder and unapologetically more mean spirited toward certain groups than in other works. It's the first Bryson book I would not recommend to or have wanted to read/listen to with my kids.

The reader/performer was clearly a talented, dynamic guy and not unpleasant to listen to. But his lilting voice inflections and mispronunciations did not do justice to Bryson's drier style of writing, or comport with my familiarity with Bryson's other readings, I had a hard time connecting the presentation with Bryson's voice.

I am not saying "steer clear," but the tone is just a little different than what makes Bryson great.

I found this to be one boring waste of time. I loved his book on 1927, Home, and SHort History…all great and liked Small Island..but this was a dud. His trip to Rome was like Mr. Stupid goes to Europe. He pays a Cab big bucks to get to his hotel 2 min. walking from the train station? And has not the smarts to know the gypsy scam…and not saavy enough to put his Checks where they can't be easily taken away by a child? His comments on the art and history of Rome are shallow. He doesn't know how to care for himself in the most basic ways, like taking some snacks or protein bars with him for just the sort of situations he always ends up in. This is just pathetic. He makes Rick Steves look like a genius. Read some Robert Hughes if you want depth on Rome. The Eternal City was wasted on Bryson. Also avoid the Appalachian Trail book...or as I call it; Bill's Travels with a Clown. And now they made a film of that book with Redford at 75 playing Bill at 40 something. I guess success means quality sinks in proportion to the bucks brought in.

Having lived in the Netherlands for ten years, I found this book amusing and interesting. I had experienced a lot of what I read or knew the areas quite well, as author Bill Bryson told his humorous tales.At first I wondered why he did this without his wife and then realized it was to gather information for the book. This choice to go alone probably gave us better insight on his travels, as it was about his adventures rather than a family experience.

It would take me reams of paper to tell the best parts of this book, because it is all good, and funny. I don't laugh at many books but I had tears in my eyes with some of the exploits I read about. Even to buying souvenirs Mr. Bryson made it a amusing situation, such as buying crucifix corn- on- the- cob holders or a Musical Last Supper toilet paper holder from shops in the Vatican City. Equally amusing was his rendition of using the Italian-English phrases in Fodor's guide to Italy. Not to spoil your fun, I won't elaborate, but run out and buy this book, now in reprint form. While you are at it, buy several copies for gifts for those of your friends and relatives who want to, wanted to, or will travel to Europe. Bill Bryson's Neither Here Nor There is the perfect book for armchair traveling.

In this book, Bill Bryson embarks on the grown-up version of backpacking across Europe. Having wandered Europe twenty years previously with a friend named Katz, he revisited some places and observes how they have changed.

Bryson has the idea of starting at Hammerfest, in far northern Norway, and then working his way south to Rome. Because he wants to see the northern lights, his journeys begin in winter, when the Arctic is still dark and, of course, cold. The northern lights don't appear to him for a couple of weeks, so the book begins at a leisurely pace, with Bryson hanging out in a dark, cold city where there really isn't much for a tourist to do.

Moving south from Hammerfest gives Bryson many cold, rainy days in Copenhagen and Stockholm before he can't take it any more and goes to Italy. From there he hops from one city to another, ending in Sofia, Bulgaria. His slower pace in the first part of the book gave him many opportunities to talk about the people in each place; in Italy, his observations tend to focus on the physical plant instead. When he gets to Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, however, his observations tun personal again.

Oddly enough, Bryson's most pithy observations are about the people but he doesn't spend much time meeting them. He comes across as a loner who is happiest wandering the streets of an unfamiliar city, visiting the museums, and then having a large number of beers at the end of the day. That strategy means that he risks making unfamiliar generalizations about the people around him, so it's remarkable that his observations don't necessarily jibe with the stereotypes. However, he doesn't pass up a stereotype if he can make a good joke.

Bryson is at his best when on the road less-traveled, from Hammerfest to Sofia, and he doesn't have much to say about the Romes of the world. He's a gifted writer, and it's a pleasure to accompany him.

Bill Bryson's humor is, as always, top-flight. One reviewer mentioned a series of jokes that he found "tiring" ... personally I found the caricatures very funny. Of course Bryson's comments are generalizations, many of them over-generalizations for humor's sake, many of them are grossly inaccurate I am sure. But the reality is that we *all* generalize, and while I understand the European point of view, I would ask the critics of this book who cry xenophobia to think about all of the over-generalizations Europeans have of America and Americans. But hey, we're all entitled to our own opinion, and humor perhaps more than anything is something that is lost in translation. I don't think the European audience is the one Bryson is targeting anyway, and I'm sure there exist many books in Europe that lampoon America to a degree that most Americans would similarly take offense at. C'est la vie.

While the humor itself rates 5 stars, the "travel" part is 3~4 stars at best. I do agree with the critics that note Bryson's somewhat formulaic style becomes a little weary after a while, and aside from the funny stories and interludes, Bryson's travels are actually on the dull side. In many ways, it felt like a sequel that was a watered down version of the original--I wondered if Bryson wouldn't have been better off writing about just his *original* youthful travels around Europe with Katz instead of this version we had--Europe: Part Deux. Bryson himself seemed to lose interest in his own travels around Italy, and often it felt like he was more interested to leave the last town than to enter the next one. By Istanbul, Bryson was clearly just going through the motions. Bryson's general lack of attachment to these places keeps the reader at arm's length as well.

In the end, I think the reader's opinion of this book will depend on how the humor is received. If you don't find it funny, this book will be a miserable read. For me, and I believe most people, the humor is hilarious enough and the flashbacks are interesting enough to carry the reader's interest from beginning to end. Still, I agree with those who say it does not match the level of Bryson's other works. The style remains but this book is missing a bit of the soul that makes Bryson's works such interesting and entertaining reads.

Reading Neither Here Nor There made me think that I won't die happy if I don't get to see Capri, and I determined that there were several other cities I don't ever wish to visit. I also learned that a certain brand of travelers' checks is terrible, and I won't be using them in this lifetime.

It is interesting to read this book in it's Communist-era, pre-Euro context. Empty shops in Bulgaria and discussion of purchasing things with dinars and schillings was very interesting. Unfortunately, reading the book even as I did, spreading the chapters out over several days, I still got that "If it's Tuesday, this must be Belgium" feeling. I began to lose track of where Bill saw the beautiful sunset, or where his pocket was picked.

I was also disappointed by Bryson's alarming views towards animals and cavalier comments about hating them and wanting them killed. Dogs hate him, and this fact has provided much humor in his writing over the years, but the tangents he went on regarding his loathing of companion animals were over the top and distinctly unfunny. So was his anti-Arabic rant during one of his many visits to queues for financial situations. I may be more sensitive to such things in light of recent world events, as comments about the guttural nature of German language or the expense of traveling in Switzerland didn't bother me, but this did.

The funniest anecdotes were the ones Bryson shared about his previous travels through Europe with his friend Katz. Katz provided a hugely politically-incorrect thread of humor in the book, and at times I thought he would have made a more interesting traveling companion. Heresy, I know.

All in all, I'm very glad I read the book, and I got many laughs out of it, but it was no Walk in the Woods.

Neither Here Nor There is probably more for the novice than the experienced traveller, but it is entertaining and has a usefully broad scope. Bill Bryson, an American resident in London, takes his readers from the Arctic Circle to Istanbul in something like a couple of months, mixing in parts of Scandinavia, the Benelux, France, Germany and Italy among others before passing through the Balkans.

Inevitably a lot is about finding hotels and places to eat, misplaced reservations and the pitfalls of communicating with strangers. This is travel writing, after all. And inevitably there tends to be quite a few clichés and national stereotyping. The commentary ranges from insightful (e.g. different perceptions of Amsterdam) to expected but fun (the police episode in Florence), to downright vulgar ("Quick restaurants - as in quick, pass the bucket!"). I found the first and last chapters, set in northern Norway, then Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, the most interesting. Bryson has more to say in out-of-the-way settings. And having travelled to the latter two at about the same time, I thought his observations both original and to the point. Nor does the book, written in the early 1990s, generally feel out-of-date.

Bryson's style combines a wide descriptive vocabulary with a matter-of-fact, colloquial tone. It drips with irony and evinces plenty of sniggers. The same note is held too long, though, which may explain why one doesn't laugh as much as one would expect: the jokes and witticisms eventually lose an essential element of surprise.

Perhaps not unusually for the genre, the book ends up saying as much about the observer as the observed. It provides a snapshot of how an educated and informed American views the European continent.

I first heard of Bill Bryson when someone mentioned him to me in a conversation. So, off I went to the bookstore, looked around, and thought, "The Europe one sounds good." I have been to some of the places Bryson visits (Amsterdam, Paris, Belgium, Germany - but not the part he went to, and Istanbul) so; I wondered how we would compare notes.
A comment about the other reviews here; Bryson is accused of xenophobia (Fear or contempt of that which is foreign, especially of strangers or foreign peoples) and other such politically incorrect attitudes. However, I think such designations are a bit of an over reaction. I do agree with one reviewer that there seems to be some gratuitous swearing and this could have been scaled back.
I found it interesting when Bryson visits places that are probably not on non-European's Travel hit list; Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Yugoslavia. However, it is interesting to see what he thinks about these places. In this book, one gets a sense of what it is like to go traveling; one must constantly find places to stay and places to eat. The downside to this is that Bryson calls nearly every place he stays at very expensive; one wonders if he is comparing it to the USA... At one point, he recounts a familiar (to me anyway) traveler�s dilemma; one travels to experience a different culture, yet one still wants pieces of home for comfort (whether it me English-language television, recognizable food, air conditioning etc) and to acquire these comforts is often prohibitively expensive.
Some of my favorite parts were in Yugoslavia (he went there before all the wars, bombing etc wrecked the country), Italy and Scandinavia. A common problem that I have experienced in certain parts of Europe is communication. I have undying admiration for the Dutch; everybody in the Netherlands speaks 3 or 4 languages. I am fluent in English and to lesser degrees in French and German. Yet, I think it better to try to communicate in the local language than always blunder around in English. Sometimes strange things happen; once I was in a small town in Turkey, and in not a few shops, I met people who knew German.
I also agree that Bryson is fun to read and reading this reminds me of meeting people on the road and swapping stories. I have just started reading his book about Australia (title: �In a sunburned country�) and I think it is much better researched (there is a bibliography), the writing seems better but perhaps it is somewhat less funny (in the course sense of the word).

This was my first Bill Bryson book and I can still remember riding the subway to work and errupting into fits of frenzied laughter as dour-faced clerks and bankers peered disapprovingly at me over their morning broadsheets. If you happen to be one of those people, I apologize. I couldn't help myself.

With Neither Here Nor There, you are not going to get a comprehensive travel guide to Europe filled with effusive descriptions or ponderous sentences like, 'Politically, as well as socially, Sweden is currently at a crossroads....' Rather, what you will get is an irreverant account of comedian-philosopher Bill Bryson country hopping about the world's most-cultured continent with no real purpose, point, or plan. And yet it works. From encounters with non-English-speaking Swedes to a flashback of a run-in with some beer-swilling, redneck Austrians, this diminuative volume makes for some great escapism. And between the jokes, there's some fine writing, a foreshadowing, of sorts, of things to come. Bryson's description of his experience in Norway, for example, is deftly-penned. Please note that this book isn't meant to be taken seriously. Its title should tell you that.

Troy Parfitt, author of Why China Will Never Rule the World

I began to read NEITHER HERE NOR THERE, as a prelude to reading Bryson's latest WALK IN THE WOODS. After all, we had not been properly introduced.
Where has he been, all my life? Bill Bryson took me on a whirlwind tour of Europe, & I never wanted to come home or quit laughing. The man has a knack, of seeing the humour in just about everything. If I had been to the places he described, I laughed harder - & if I had not, well I want to go there & laugh again.
He does have a serious & thoughtful side to him as well - his descriptions of the Northern Lights were graphic, & he has shown himself to be a real 'people person' - he captures in words every tic & quirk meticulously.
It has been such a long time since a book had me roaring out loud. Bryson's descriptions of some of the 'seamier' shops in Hamburg brought tears to my eyes, along with his very apt descriptions of the streets of Amsterdam: I could see it, I could hear it, & yes, I could almost smell it!
The best part, is seeing how many European readers have reviewed his books so favourably - thank goodness they can laugh at themselves. Now I must read more - to find out why an equal amount of Americans cannot laugh at themselves, in his book about America? Is Bryson less funny - or - ?
I cannot wait to read everything this man has written. I firmly believe laughter is the best medicine, & I think I want to have some stock on hand, just in case I laugh myself sick.

Before embarking on a longish trip, Jill and I like to read about the places we are going to visit. Not just guidebooks--although I must admit we buy those by the pound--but travelogues, histories, and novels set in those areas. Sometimes this is easy. Italy and the Galapagos are well represented in literature. Other places are not so visited by those whose inclinations are to put pen to paper or hands to keyboard, including Ecuador and Costa Rica. At the present, I am unsure of where Austria and Switzerland will fall, but the thought has crossed my mind that a well-placed proposal might nab me a book contract.
As histories go, Austria is completely overshadowed by its larger German-speaking neighbor. This is unfortunate. While it is understandable that historians be interested in Germany, Austria has plenty to answer for in the last century as well. The same goes for the Swiss, who sorely need some bright lights shone in their shady vaults and executive suites, as the recent findings about Jewish bank accounts proves.
The problem in travelogues lies in the fact that no travel writer seems to go to either of these countries by themselves. Nestled in the heart of Europe, they are waystops between places--like from Germany to Italy or France to Russia--and while travelers may make it a point to stop in, say Salzburg or Zurich, for the night, the urge to stay never comes over them. According to Bill Bryson, the lack of this urge may not be wholly the blame of the visitor.
Austria and Switzerland each get a chapter (out of the total 22) in Bryson's Neither Here Nor There. Similar to his first travelogue, The Lost Continent, this one has Bryson still trying to recapture earlier days, but in Europe. Although American by birth, Bryson is thoroughly British in his writing and wit. His journeys resemble those of Redmond 0'Hanlon, except more cosmopolitan acid without a companion. It is not that things go wrong necessarily, but that when they do so he describes it so hilariously.
Something that Bryson does not describe is how he can afford his trip-- both in time and money. He mentions wife and children seldomly, although he has both. He does not mention regular employment, but I get the feeling that he is not independently wealthy either. It is neither here nor there, but I am intensely curious (if only to see if it is possible to emulate).
I am not sure that I learned that much about my upcoming vacation here, but Europe through Bryson's eyes is almost as much fun as going yourself.

In this book, the American travel writer Bill Bryson decides to take a big trip around all the countries in Europe. He starts at Hammerfest (the northernmost town in Europe), goes through countries including Germany, Holland and Italy, ending at Istanbul (near Asia). He retraces the steps he took as a young student in the early seventies.

I wasn`t sure I would like this book because I`m not normally a fan of travel writing, but after reading a bit I began to really enjoy it, because its very funny. Bryson makes lots of wry observations and little jokes about the places he visits (for example, did you know Liechtenstein is the worlds largest producer of false teeth and sausage skins?)

He also boasts a near-encyclopedic knowledge of each country he is talking about, so this book is also good if you`re interested in European geography or history, but I think the humor is its best feature.

Although the book contains lots of funny jokes, the thing I don`t like is that Bryson has a tendency to swear an awful lot and use bad language in his narrative. Swearing occasionally I can understand, but he does it so much that after a while it ceases to be amusing and Bryson sounds like a 12 year old saying "I can use four letter words! Aren`t I clever?" Bryson has a tremendous talent with words, and there is no need for him to resort to this.

Apart from that, I think this is a great book and would recommend it to anyone who likes Bill Brysons humor. If you`re new to the travel writing genre in general, or Bill Bryson, this book is a great place to start - its guaranteed to make you smile.

This was a pleasant breeze of a book on European travel which I read in less than 2 days, actually while travelling back from London. I found some of Mr. Brysons observations on European societies to be insightful and on the money. I especially enjoyed his take on Italian drivers and the Scandanavian penchant for public drunkenness, however his classification of Germans as "fat and arrogant" is probably untrue. Surely Americans are fatter and the French more arrogant, but lets not split hairs.
The greatest weakness of Bryson's writing seems to be his overuse of hyperbole in trying to get a laugh. Sometimes he connects, and I did laugh out loud many times in my reading, but most of the time it seems he is trying too hard to be funny.
Bryson, being a travel writer, does not seem particularly adventurous or much of a risk taker. He generally sticks to well travelled, touristy places in very safe European cities. He seems to confine himself to museums, churches, city centers and the hotel bar and nothing else. Worst of all, he does not really interact much with the locals which he is making such broad observations about. Aside from ordering food and drink and checking in and out of hotels, Bryson overall seems a timid introvert writing smart alecky comments about people he is not truly trying to understand.

I love Bill Bryson. I've read almost all his books, and each time I finish another one, I get a little sad thinking there are now fewer left for me to get to. He is that good.
"Neither Here Nor There" is classic Bryson. This guy could write about paint drying and still make the funniest, smartest observations ever. Although all the giddy excitement of traveling to new places shines through in this memoir, most of the time Bryson talks about his experiences on trains, railway stations, police stations, waiting rooms, or hotel rooms by himself. Here is were his true talent shines through and he illuminates the absolutely wacky in the mundane.
I could have done without some of the misguided political commentaries he let slip in this book, but it is still a wonderful treat to see Europe through this mild-mannered madman's eyes. If you really want to laugh and laugh, go pick up this book--and all his other ones, too!

In Neither here nor there, Bryson soaks up Europe and sprinkles it with his wit, observations and humour to go. You have to admire his ability. He goes to Rome and Paris and Berlin, but doesn't stop there because this is Europe we are talking about. He finds himself in Bulgaria and Hammerfest, looks at Istanbul and trots along Oslo. What is the result?
An undoubtedly entertaining book. The first few chapters are as fresh and engaging, the words flow through your conscience magically. One country's culture is analysed and evaluated in the most brilliantly delightful way. There are jokes. None of them are subtle and are all of the same mode, Bryson-esque, and for 75% of the time,they please. He makes a particularly good day of his a good chapter. You laugh. He loves the sunshine, museums and parks.
Then sets in. Bryson appears to enjoy making fun of people. He makes fun of himself and pleases the reader at his expense, but openly insulting a poor waiter? And there are the occassional comments that you have to read several times in order to come close to not saying, "Hey, this is racist." And he uses the term, 'What a wonderful country', several times. He spends too little time here and rushes off to the next, only to waste pages and pages there. Why does he always tell us about his experiences with dining? It begins to flag. And his travels become slightly tiresome. He has to go to parks and museums. You begin not to care about whether or not he goes to Sorrento and Capri because you know he'll throw around the same jokes and make roughly the same comments as he did with Rome. It's only during the last quarter of the book, which is a bit too late, that you feel this is a good book. Because you realise the contrasts between the beginning and the end. These are pedantic quibbles, but they are warranted and should be considered.
Bryson is honest with us. He shares his opinions, recalls his travels with Katz twenty years earlier, relieves us with extremely amusing anecdotes. He tells us whether he likes this place or that, or whether he loathes whatever. It is great but, because he stops inventing after a while, it becomes a slight chore. And the question that I ask is if Europe can be condensed into bite-sized diluted pieces of writing to form a 300-page book. No?
If you aren't particularly critical and enjoy a read where for the most part, you can leave your brain behind, Neither here nor there is a smashing read. But, and here it is, but his later books, especially Note from a Small Island and A Walk in the Woods are much more enjoyable, detailed but at the same time readable. This isn't to say Neither here not there isn't good or delectable or lovable, but it simply isn't as good. His later books seem like results of learning from mistakes in this book and, it comes down to this, they are much more worth your cash. Invest in these books if you want Bill Bryson. If you've read all of his except for this, you'll probably be disappointed.

I have not read "A Walk in the Woods", Bryson's celebrated novel and apparently, precursor to "Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe." However, having read this book, I now want to read the prequel - as it were.

This book was written in trademark Bill Bryson style - warmth, wit and fluid reading. It's great reading about Bryson's adventures in so many - and so varied - European locales. My favorite was early in the book when he visits Hammerfest in the far northern reaches of Europe to see the Northern Lights. Perhaps because I too have this on my "bucket list", this became my favorite of Bryson's travels. (Although, my personal preference is to see the Aurora Borealis in Alaska).

But, I was on tenterhooks waiting to see to what extent - if at all - certain places in Europe changed from his previous visit with his friend Stephen Katz. Indeed, given the many mentions of Katz in this book, he almost served as a ghostly presence (but not in a scary, creepy way).

Side note: if I were to ever visit Mittle Europa, Vienna was on my list. However, reading Bryson's description of his visit makes me reconsider my choice. It was Bryson's disappointment in the Viennese cafes that puts Vienna on pause for me. I had some utopian vision of a Viennese café as some scrumptious, yet bohemian place to rest, and fortify with good pastries and coffee. Alas, it doesn't sound as though the average café has such offerings or atmosphere.

Of all the locales Bryson visited, I can't really say that any of them stood out for me, wanting me to visit. [Disclaimer: I have already touristed in Rome and Florence or else they would have gone on the list.] I guess in this respect, Bryson failed as a travel writer because he didn't pimp any particular place, making the reader desperate to visit. But, I'm glad he didn't actively promote his visits, since I don't believe he's a Rick Steves type of travel writer. Rather, I appreciated Bryson's honest observations.

For the most part, I enjoyed reading this book. I do have to admit, at times, I got bored reading about the author's latest attempt to secure lodging or meals. Even the many museum visits tended to blur by the latter stages of the book. The one part of the travelogue I never tired of were Bryson's promenade through whatever city he was currently in. It's those passages that show the true flavor of the city and its people. At times sad, fascinating, wonderful and revolting, it was nevertheless all interesting to read about.

This is the second book by Bill Bryson that I have read, but since the first was Shakespeare: The World as Stage, this was the first time I got to experience Bryson's humor and travel writing. I was hardly disappointed. In "Travels in Europe" Bryson writes about the cross-continent trek that he took alone in 1990 and he weaves memories of a trip that he made in the 1970s with a friend across Europe. Bryson travels from Hammerfest in northern Norway to Paris, Belgium, and the Netherlands, to Germany, Denmark, and Sweden, to Italy, Switzerland, Lichtenstein, and Austria, to Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and finally Istanbul. Bryson can be both hilarious and serious at times (for example his sobering discussion of Switzerland), although he is mostly hilarious. There is at least one sentence on each page that will make you grin, and there is about one sentence in every ten pages that will make you laugh out loud.

A sampler: while at a restaurant in the German city of Aachen, Bryson attempts to order a beer,

My waitress spoke no English, and I had the most extraordinary difficulty getting myself understood. I asked for a beer and she looked at me askance. "Wass? Tier?"
"Nein, beer," I said, and her puzzlement grew.
"Fear? Steer? Queer? King Leer?"
"Nein, nein, beer." I pointed at the menu.
"Ah, beer," she said, with a private "tut," as if I had been intentionally misleading her.

Although it is clear that Bryson took some artistic license in creating this dialogue, this comical passage highlights the difficulty that Bryson encounters throughout his travels in only knowing one language. And at times I wished that Bryson was multilingual, as Bryson would have been able to probe the various countries and cultures that he experienced. Rather, it seems that Bryson is stuck with the normal tourist sites and relegated to eating alone in expensive restaurants; but Bryson is a great writer so his wit and prose make up for this inconvenience.

Once he gets to Yugoslavia Bryson notices that he has become homesick, and I must admit that I too was getting a little worn out of his increasingly monotonous travels, and I was glad when he wrapped things up in Istanbul. But all-in-all this was a fun book to read.

I picked this book up kind of randomly. "A Walk in The Woods" always seemed kind of hippy-dippy to me - and while I am quite the liberal chick, I am not so enviro-hippy. When my dad, a conservative guy, told me he loved it, I thought, "huh". Then I picked up Bill Bryson.
The gimmick in "Neither Here Nor There" is a return to Europe. As a young man in the '70s, American Bryson spent 4 months backpacking with an unforgettable loudmouthed "friend" named Katz. Now, 20 years later, he returns, following virtually the same route. The result: kind of makes you want to pick up and meander through Europe the way Bryson does.
Along the way (through Paris, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Italy, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria), he sprinkles his essays with historical notations (usually funny, sometimes somber, as with his tribute the amazing people of the Netherlands, the humanitarians of WWII who put life, and the safety of their Jewish population above all else), sometimes hysterically funny observations (about the people, cultures and TV channels in each country) and reflections - comparing Europe now to Europe in 1970. An interesting thing to note is that this book was written in 1990, before much of the conflict in Yugoslavia began on a grand scale. When I arrived at the chapter entitled "Sarajevo", I worried for Bryson's safety and wondered about his choice of a war zone for vacation. Then I checked the copywrite date. Because of the time it was written - so contemporary, yet milleniums away for the people of Yugoslavia - this book offers a unique perspective on Yugoslavia BEFORE the war ... a world that sadly, doesn't exist, is nicely perserved with Bryson's trademark spot on observation, wit and reflection.
Though this book is compulsively readable, there are some flaws. Bryson can be negative at times, complaining that "Europe has changed", bemoaning globalization and the "Disney-fying" of the Continent. However, he does not reflect too much on how HE has changed and how his perceptions - that is, his level of comfort, his experiences etc... - have colored how he sees Europe. This kind of reflection would have been interesting ... we expect everything to stay the same, when nothing can because we never do.
Overall, this is a great book to read - especially before (or perhaps even more so, after) a trip to Europe. Even better, bring it with you to the banks of the Danube and sip a coke or coffee at a Cafe. You'll be happy to have a friend with you.

Across Europe, from Brussels to Bulgaria, Bill Bryson takes us up alleyways, into coffee shops with indifferent waitstaff, into overpriced museums, across ancient bridges and onto crowded buses through death-defying mountain passes, into magnficent town squares and finally, repairing, into various hotel rooms which occasionally overlook gloriously sunsetted harbors. It's a fantastic and schizophrenic yet entirely believable mix of experiences (even as Bill's out-loud thinking sometimes intrudes into the narrative). We're right there with him, thanks to his down to the dustball description of every minute detail alerting every sense. One can almost smell the malodorous feet of the geezer next to him on the bus to Belgrade. Or hear the Swedish girl of his dreams as she breathes into his deleriously drunken ear: "I'm fool of lust".

Mr. Bryson's amazing account of this journey falls back occasionally to a trip taken with a college buddy two decades earlier. At the start of the book this flashback is a little distracting and seems out of place, but as the diary progresses it makes sense; a brief understanding of his earlier trip comes in handy in spots as he looks back at how things have changed in the various countries he visits. The continuing communistic state of Bulgaria (in 1990) is particularly poignant and despite his gourmand-like tendencies, Mr. Bryson is not without honest compassion for the poor, currency-waving, bedraggled citizens queuing up to make meager purchases at nearly empty shops. Especially as he reposes in the only place of true civilized comfort in town: the Sheraton. It is also interesting to read the peaceful account of his stay in Sarajevo -- "the setting sun crowning a skyline of minarets and ... muezzins' tortured calls to prayer echoing over the rooftops" -- on the eve of the bloody few years which would follow in that region.

Mr. Bryson is a master at descriptive writing and a master of English, if not language in general. Second only to this is his skillful and biting sarcasm, which allows for at least one LOL moment per page. Some may find it tiresome, some of the humor IS repulsive and it DID border on "enough already" for me too at times. But I have to say, this is one of the most entertaining AND informative books I've ever read. I highly recommend it, if you can put up with Bryson's non-stop sarcasm and propensity for nerdy self-obsession.

Indexed; endpapers contain handy map of Europe with countries outlined. It is a curious oversight that Poland is unnamed.

This is a great, often grumpy trip across huge swaths of Europe. Bryson's willingness to get himself into befuddling situations and dive headfirst into unusual situations where he has no clue what is going on makes him a great person to learn about these countries from. He really gets to know some of these places, and other places he can't get out of fast enough. Not only does he describe his experiences well, but he gives a nice and learned dose of historical, political, and cultural facts about each of the locations. This, like all of Bryson's travelogues, was a great read.

There is no doubt that Bill Bryson can make me laugh. Out loud even! Bryson's whimsical description of his stop and go tour through Europe constantly entertains. I learnt about Europe, the idiosyncrasies of its places and people.

Probably one of the highlights was Bryson's hilarious description of his desperation to reach the toilet of his hotel room while his terribly overfull bladder is bursting. Without giving my belly a chance to recover from laughing, this account was immediately followed by the equally hilarious description of Bryson's efforts to find food in the hotel to satisfy the urgent needs of his terribly empty stomach, an attempt which involved dead end fire-escapes, three drunken Japanese men in blue business suits, a stubborn elevator that keeps returning to the same floor, locked doors, and an over-zealous waiter who takes away the very peanuts that our starved hero so desperately needed.

What I find most disappointing about this book, however, is that Bryson frequently sees the need to resort to a brand of humor below the waist and above the knees. Such gutter humour, sexual jokes and innuendos are hardly necessary given Bryson's incredible talent with words. Although there are chapters without this foul-mouthed and low-down humour, on the whole Bryson has painted the whole book with this gutter-style brush of sexual humour. In my view this negative cancels out all the positives of the book. If it wasn't for this, "Neither Here Nor There" would be a brilliant book. As it is, however, Bryson has successfully allowed his book to be re-classified amongst a great deal of "trash" in the humour section. Too bad.

On the bright side, this book is one of Bryson's early works, and he seems to have matured with age. The weaknesses of this book are much less evident in his most recent work, "In a Sunburned Country", which describes his trip to Australia. If you are going to buy only one Bill Bryson book, I would recommend purchasing this latter title instead. - GODLY GADFLY

I generally love the Bryson books-- A Walk in the Woods was great, I enjoyed "In a Sunburned Country", and I found A Short History to be both very entertaining and educational. I had to struggle to make it through "Neither Here nor There". The tone is generally whiny. The adventures are generally not adventures at all. The flashbacks to his backpacking are good on the whole but the "present day" stuff tends to be incredibly dry. There is lots and lots of "I arrived in town. Had a hard time finding a hotel room (or meal). I finally did [and complain about price about 33-50% of the time]. I walked up and down some streets and then left town." The sidebar stories are more self-centered and less entertaining/educational. I thought I'd get a good travelogue with some interesting sidebars and anectdotes on each of the locations. I really didn't get much of that.

If you enjoy Bryson's good books, I'd avoid this one. If you want to hear him complain about making a claim for lost travellers checks then this is the book for you.

This book is an average book: enjoyable at times, slow and boring at others. While Bryson maintains his sarcastic style used in Walk in the Woods, Notes from a Small Island and the Lost Continent (all better choices as intros to Bill's brain), he fails to bring out what always saved his sarcastic rants: his fondness for the people or country.
In the 3 books I listed, Bryson deliciously skewers the US and UK and their people, but there's always a loving undercurrent underneath (kind of like teasing the sibling which you love to death). In case you miss the point, he would end the book by saying how much he loved the respective countries.
In this book, no such love is found. He just rants and raves about different European peoples and cities. Further lowering the enjoyability of this book are the few remarks that could be considered racist or xenophobic. As to these remarks, they don't get a lot of airplay and only sensitive people (or members of the groups) will object to them, but they're there nonetheless.
All in all, I'd recommend this book only for those who have read the other Bryson travel books and need to read everything he has written. Otherwise, read the 3 books listed above and his essay compilation "I'm a Stranger Here Myself."

Bill Bryson's "Neither Here Nor There" is another great travelogue from one of the funniest travel writers out there. The book chronicles Bryson's solo journey through Europe in 1990. He spends most of his time in Western Europe, but also ventures east for brief visits to Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. The chapters are compact. Like most backpackers, Bryson gets footloose after staying in one place for more than a few days, and quickly packs his pen for his next exciting destination.

Many reviewers fault Bryson for being too negative about the people he meets and the places he goes. I don't hold that against him. He's a satirist, who's in his element when exaggerating the foibles of what he discovers. In fact, the funniest vignettes in the book involve his awkward and uncomfortable encounters with all of those smelly, noisy, oh-so-clueless locals. My only complaint is that I wish he had taken it a bit further. I think Bryson was sensitive to being criticized for being too critical. To address that, he throws in far too many "it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen" and "it was the most delicious meal I had ever eaten" to keep the overall tone more or less balanced. Splashes of Rick Steves isn't what I wanted to read.

Perhaps the problem is that Bryson traveled alone. Without his trusty foil, the pseudonymous Stephen Katz, the stories lack that zesty punch that make "A Walk in the Woods" so memorable. But this isn't a major blemish. When it comes to humorous travel writing, there are few who can keep pace with Bryson.

Very few book provide laugh out loud humor. In fact, I didn't realize this book did until people on the plane started asking me what had me crying in the aisle!
So, if you've been to Europe and haven't read TRAVELS, your trip isn't complete!
If you haven't been to Europe, don't read this on pain of becoming most unbecomingly jealous of those who have!
Live Europe through the perspicacious and witty eyes of fellow traveler Bill Bryson, the very personable Master of the Travelogue renaissance.
A joy to read, it's as much a series of shorts on various locations throughout Europe as a complete novel, connnected by the trials and tribulations of one B. Bryson and companion.
TRAVELS also provides a great view back 20 years in European travel - back when Europe seemed a bit more like a 3rd world country, if all is to be believed. Don't let this scare you, things have changed quite a lot (if not the toilets, of course).
Cheers,
BilFish

Having just returned from Japan, Kuala Lumpur and Australia, I'm not yet ready to attack "War and Peace." But after reading Bryson's "In a Sunburned Country," which gave us a hilarious and tantalizing introduction to Australia, I'm finding "Neither Here Nor There" just as much fun and an easy read while suffering from post-Australian jet lag.
I've visited most of the cities he describes, and he brings back lots of funny memories and also takes me back to places and points out things I really didn't pay enough attention to when I was there. As another customer reviewer said, if you don't laugh a lot when reading Bryson, you don't have a sense of humor, and I wouldn't want to be stuck on a desert island with you.
Although I winced a few times at some of his crude language -- he doesn't use it in "Sunburned"; maybe he found his vocabulary during the 90's -- he didn't use any words I haven't used myself when the situation warranted it.
Read it and laugh.

Bill Bryson really made it big in England after the release of 'Notes from a Small Island', which, however isn't his best book. His best would be either 'The Lost Continent' or this book 'Neither Here Nor There'. I very rarely laugh out loud at TV shows or books. Only 'Frasier' on TV and Bill Bryson in books have this capacity to make me laugh relentlessly. 'Neither here Nor There' is Bryson's story of the reenactment of his student-day travels through Europe some twenty years later. He tries to visit all the places that he visited with Katz (yup, he appears in 'Walk in the Woods' too) in the seventies, as well as Norway to see the northern lights. Bryson's descriptions of situations are hilarious, primarily because he is just a normal guy and you can imagine yourself in the same situation, especially if you have visited any of the countries he visits, but even if you haven't, it is still a delight to read. Another great thing about Bill Bryson is that he is not afraid to be politically incorrect, calling France's population 'Insufferably French' to give just one example. He is also happy to insult a place if he feels it deserves it, something which other travel writers can seem reluctant to do. He of course balances out these criticisms with his entusiasm for so many places and you also learn many interesting facts from his stories such as Liechtenstein is the world's largest producer of sausage skins and dentures. Hands up who knew that!!! I can't even begin to do this book justice in my review, all I can say is buy Bill Bryson's books and I promise you will not be dissppointed, they are all a joy to read. Bill seems a lovely guy and, in his words, not mine, 'If he wishes to acknowledge this unsolicited endorsement with a set of luggage or a skiing holiday in the Rockies, let the record show that I am ready to accept it'!!!

You must know by now that I never write a bad review about this guy. In this book, we take a whirlwind tour of Europe. You can read the cover blurbs about how funny and perceptive he is, and how skillful he is with the language, and how eminently readable he is. I agree with every word. But I'd like to mention that this isn't some snooty tour guide or gushing forth bubblehead. He's an average guy who won't hesitate to tell you what sucks, or leave a place that he doesn't like, or bend over backwards to say nice things. He'll bash anybody, himself included. He's refreshingly honest.

Plus, if you had it in your head that Europe was just one homogenous place, or if perhaps you've heard a whole bunch of national or cities names and characteristics and can't keep them all straight, this book will fix that right up. In addition, if you're overseas but in a country nowhere near Europe, perhaps some place in Asia, you can still enjoy some very familiar situations. In case you haven't guessed, I highly recommend this book.

It can't truly be said about many authors, but Bill Bryson is laugh-out-loud funny. Especially if you like your humor with a little edge to it. "Neither Here Nor There," was one of his travelogs that preceeded his massively sucessful "A Walk in the Woods" (and is now a dozen years old). Yet it is not remotley dated.
The book is basically Bryson doing what he does best, bumming around a particular countryside (this time all over continental Euroope) and commenting upon everything he sees, hears, smells, tastes and touches. He does not particularly seek out resort spots, nor would the typical tourist want to imitate his arduous treks (many of which involve endless walking). But that's what makes his work so charming. He travels the way most of us live, and his sense of humor is unsurpassed.
Overall, another winning travel book from one of the most offbeat popular writers working today.

Bryson brings his characteristic humor to his explorations of Europe. While his observations can sometimes be a bit mean-spirited, he also pokes fun at himself, and many of his observations are quite funny, if clearly exaggerated. Starting in the artic north of Norway, and continuing in a zigzag pattern across the continent, Bryson explores many of the most famous of Europe's cities, as well as some more obscure locals. While he notes the changes in Sofia that occurred after his visit, his descriptions of Yugoslavia are even more dated (starting with the fact that Yugoslavia doesn't exist anymore!). Fans of Bryson's humor won't be disappointed, but if you're looking for a guide to traveling in Europe, this probably won't be your best resource.

So far this is my favorite of Bryson's travel books, though, in some ways it is also his most eccentric. This memoir represents a return visit to Europe, when a more affluent, middle aged journalist Bryson retraces his earlier trail through Europe as a carefree youth. Besides his characteristic sardonic observations, his descriptions include a number of nostaglic reminiscences and disappointment as his recollections are viewed through rose colored glasses.
You have to have tolerance for Bryson's use of the various venues as a means of launching into sophomoric tangents reflecting on having lusted after beautiful young women, or puerile comments on digestion and bathroom habits that provide too much information.
His descriptions are the usual mix of admiring and scathing; he clearly was enraptured with Southern Italy and less than impressed with Brussels and much of Belgium. His stereotypes of the various nationalities while often funny are outrageous and savage.
This is a good airplane, pool side, stuck somewhere book. It keeps you interested and amused.

When Bill Bryson was in his twenties he went on a trip to Europe. It was for him a liberating experiance despite spending his time with a friend called Katz.
This book is about another trip that he goes on through Europe after he has worked in England for some years as a journalist. He starts of in Norway and travels through Europe to Istanbul.
Bryson is partially a travel writer, partially a story teller. His books are largely a starting point to have a talk. That can be about his childhood, his German teacher or his belief in the arrogance of French people. This book is actually a laugh out loud type of book. I first read it some years ago, but on re-reading it recently the jokes were just as funny and one actually breaks into laughter reading it.
The book is short and can be read quickly but it is worth every penny you pay for it.

I was quite curious to see what Bryson would make of Milan, the city where I live. I'd already read quite a few of his other books so I was looking forward to an interesting, intelligent read. Instead, I was amazed: the man was unable to find a coffee shop in the centre of town.
This makes me have my doubts about Bryson as a travel writer. If he couldn't find a coffee shop in a town that has at least two on every block, who knows how many other things he is wrong about? Can I trust his observations on other countries?
On the positive side, the book is amusing, the anecdotes about his youth are funny and his observations are interesting even if after a while they become somewhat trite and predictable. They usually run along the lines of "Why would anyone in their right mind tear down this <insert word here> to put up a modern <insert word here>"). This is a book that's certainly worth reading, even if it's not worth taking seriously.

This book is an average book: enjoyable at times, slow and boring at others. While Bryson maintains his sarcastic style used in Walk in the Woods, Notes from a Small Island and the Lost Continent (all better choices as intros to Bill's brain), he fails to bring out what always saved his sarcastic rants: his fondness for the people or country.
In the 3 books I listed, Bryson deliciously skewers the US and UK and their people, but there's always a loving undercurrent underneath (kind of like teasing the sibling which you love to death). In case you miss the point, he would end the book by saying how much he loved the respective countries.
In this book, no such love is found. He just rants and raves about different European peoples and cities. Further lowering the enjoyability of this book are the few remarks that could be considered racist or xenophobic. As to these remarks, they don't get a lot of airplay and only sensitive people (or members of the groups) will object to them, but they're there nonetheless.
All in all, I'd recommend this book only for those who have read the other Bryson travel books and need to read everything he has written. Otherwise, read the 3 books listed above and his essay compilation "I'm a Stranger Here Myself."

Bill Bryson's "Neither Here Nor There" is another great travelogue from one of the funniest travel writers out there. The book chronicles Bryson's solo journey through Europe in 1990. He spends most of his time in Western Europe, but also ventures east for brief visits to Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. The chapters are compact. Like most backpackers, Bryson gets footloose after staying in one place for more than a few days, and quickly packs his pen for his next exciting destination.

Many reviewers fault Bryson for being too negative about the people he meets and the places he goes. I don't hold that against him. He's a satirist, who's in his element when exaggerating the foibles of what he discovers. In fact, the funniest vignettes in the book involve his awkward and uncomfortable encounters with all of those smelly, noisy, oh-so-clueless locals. My only complaint is that I wish he had taken it a bit further. I think Bryson was sensitive to being criticized for being too critical. To address that, he throws in far too many "it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen" and "it was the most delicious meal I had ever eaten" to keep the overall tone more or less balanced. Splashes of Rick Steves isn't what I wanted to read.

Perhaps the problem is that Bryson traveled alone. Without his trusty foil, the pseudonymous Stephen Katz, the stories lack that zesty punch that make "A Walk in the Woods" so memorable. But this isn't a major blemish. When it comes to humorous travel writing, there are few who can keep pace with Bryson.

Very few book provide laugh out loud humor. In fact, I didn't realize this book did until people on the plane started asking me what had me crying in the aisle!
So, if you've been to Europe and haven't read TRAVELS, your trip isn't complete!
If you haven't been to Europe, don't read this on pain of becoming most unbecomingly jealous of those who have!
Live Europe through the perspicacious and witty eyes of fellow traveler Bill Bryson, the very personable Master of the Travelogue renaissance.
A joy to read, it's as much a series of shorts on various locations throughout Europe as a complete novel, connnected by the trials and tribulations of one B. Bryson and companion.
TRAVELS also provides a great view back 20 years in European travel - back when Europe seemed a bit more like a 3rd world country, if all is to be believed. Don't let this scare you, things have changed quite a lot (if not the toilets, of course).
Cheers,
BilFish

Having just returned from Japan, Kuala Lumpur and Australia, I'm not yet ready to attack "War and Peace." But after reading Bryson's "In a Sunburned Country," which gave us a hilarious and tantalizing introduction to Australia, I'm finding "Neither Here Nor There" just as much fun and an easy read while suffering from post-Australian jet lag.
I've visited most of the cities he describes, and he brings back lots of funny memories and also takes me back to places and points out things I really didn't pay enough attention to when I was there. As another customer reviewer said, if you don't laugh a lot when reading Bryson, you don't have a sense of humor, and I wouldn't want to be stuck on a desert island with you.
Although I winced a few times at some of his crude language -- he doesn't use it in "Sunburned"; maybe he found his vocabulary during the 90's -- he didn't use any words I haven't used myself when the situation warranted it.
Read it and laugh.

Bill Bryson really made it big in England after the release of 'Notes from a Small Island', which, however isn't his best book. His best would be either 'The Lost Continent' or this book 'Neither Here Nor There'. I very rarely laugh out loud at TV shows or books. Only 'Frasier' on TV and Bill Bryson in books have this capacity to make me laugh relentlessly. 'Neither here Nor There' is Bryson's story of the reenactment of his student-day travels through Europe some twenty years later. He tries to visit all the places that he visited with Katz (yup, he appears in 'Walk in the Woods' too) in the seventies, as well as Norway to see the northern lights. Bryson's descriptions of situations are hilarious, primarily because he is just a normal guy and you can imagine yourself in the same situation, especially if you have visited any of the countries he visits, but even if you haven't, it is still a delight to read. Another great thing about Bill Bryson is that he is not afraid to be politically incorrect, calling France's population 'Insufferably French' to give just one example. He is also happy to insult a place if he feels it deserves it, something which other travel writers can seem reluctant to do. He of course balances out these criticisms with his entusiasm for so many places and you also learn many interesting facts from his stories such as Liechtenstein is the world's largest producer of sausage skins and dentures. Hands up who knew that!!! I can't even begin to do this book justice in my review, all I can say is buy Bill Bryson's books and I promise you will not be dissppointed, they are all a joy to read. Bill seems a lovely guy and, in his words, not mine, 'If he wishes to acknowledge this unsolicited endorsement with a set of luggage or a skiing holiday in the Rockies, let the record show that I am ready to accept it'!!!

You must know by now that I never write a bad review about this guy. In this book, we take a whirlwind tour of Europe. You can read the cover blurbs about how funny and perceptive he is, and how skillful he is with the language, and how eminently readable he is. I agree with every word. But I'd like to mention that this isn't some snooty tour guide or gushing forth bubblehead. He's an average guy who won't hesitate to tell you what sucks, or leave a place that he doesn't like, or bend over backwards to say nice things. He'll bash anybody, himself included. He's refreshingly honest.

Plus, if you had it in your head that Europe was just one homogenous place, or if perhaps you've heard a whole bunch of national or cities names and characteristics and can't keep them all straight, this book will fix that right up. In addition, if you're overseas but in a country nowhere near Europe, perhaps some place in Asia, you can still enjoy some very familiar situations. In case you haven't guessed, I highly recommend this book.

It can't truly be said about many authors, but Bill Bryson is laugh-out-loud funny. Especially if you like your humor with a little edge to it. "Neither Here Nor There," was one of his travelogs that preceeded his massively sucessful "A Walk in the Woods" (and is now a dozen years old). Yet it is not remotley dated.
The book is basically Bryson doing what he does best, bumming around a particular countryside (this time all over continental Euroope) and commenting upon everything he sees, hears, smells, tastes and touches. He does not particularly seek out resort spots, nor would the typical tourist want to imitate his arduous treks (many of which involve endless walking). But that's what makes his work so charming. He travels the way most of us live, and his sense of humor is unsurpassed.
Overall, another winning travel book from one of the most offbeat popular writers working today.

Bryson brings his characteristic humor to his explorations of Europe. While his observations can sometimes be a bit mean-spirited, he also pokes fun at himself, and many of his observations are quite funny, if clearly exaggerated. Starting in the artic north of Norway, and continuing in a zigzag pattern across the continent, Bryson explores many of the most famous of Europe's cities, as well as some more obscure locals. While he notes the changes in Sofia that occurred after his visit, his descriptions of Yugoslavia are even more dated (starting with the fact that Yugoslavia doesn't exist anymore!). Fans of Bryson's humor won't be disappointed, but if you're looking for a guide to traveling in Europe, this probably won't be your best resource.

So far this is my favorite of Bryson's travel books, though, in some ways it is also his most eccentric. This memoir represents a return visit to Europe, when a more affluent, middle aged journalist Bryson retraces his earlier trail through Europe as a carefree youth. Besides his characteristic sardonic observations, his descriptions include a number of nostaglic reminiscences and disappointment as his recollections are viewed through rose colored glasses.
You have to have tolerance for Bryson's use of the various venues as a means of launching into sophomoric tangents reflecting on having lusted after beautiful young women, or puerile comments on digestion and bathroom habits that provide too much information.
His descriptions are the usual mix of admiring and scathing; he clearly was enraptured with Southern Italy and less than impressed with Brussels and much of Belgium. His stereotypes of the various nationalities while often funny are outrageous and savage.
This is a good airplane, pool side, stuck somewhere book. It keeps you interested and amused.

When Bill Bryson was in his twenties he went on a trip to Europe. It was for him a liberating experiance despite spending his time with a friend called Katz.
This book is about another trip that he goes on through Europe after he has worked in England for some years as a journalist. He starts of in Norway and travels through Europe to Istanbul.
Bryson is partially a travel writer, partially a story teller. His books are largely a starting point to have a talk. That can be about his childhood, his German teacher or his belief in the arrogance of French people. This book is actually a laugh out loud type of book. I first read it some years ago, but on re-reading it recently the jokes were just as funny and one actually breaks into laughter reading it.
The book is short and can be read quickly but it is worth every penny you pay for it.

I was quite curious to see what Bryson would make of Milan, the city where I live. I'd already read quite a few of his other books so I was looking forward to an interesting, intelligent read. Instead, I was amazed: the man was unable to find a coffee shop in the centre of town.
This makes me have my doubts about Bryson as a travel writer. If he couldn't find a coffee shop in a town that has at least two on every block, who knows how many other things he is wrong about? Can I trust his observations on other countries?
On the positive side, the book is amusing, the anecdotes about his youth are funny and his observations are interesting even if after a while they become somewhat trite and predictable. They usually run along the lines of "Why would anyone in their right mind tear down this <insert word here> to put up a modern <insert word here>"). This is a book that's certainly worth reading, even if it's not worth taking seriously.

This was the second from this author I read. Loved the first I read. Not so much this one. He talks of his travels through Western Europe. At first the book is funny and he is easy to read, the way he describes places. However, it quickly becomes all complaints and negatives comments. It's obvious (though never said like this) that the places he enjoys (and actually talks positively about) are the cities where he meets people and has real conversations. When this doesn't happen, he is 'disappointed' in the city/country and just rants and complains. He's hypocritical wanting something from one city and then dogging the next for having just that. Save yourself the time and just travel and have meet locals. I couldn't even finish the book.

This book is by no means meant to be a typical travel guide. This is more like a memoir of sorts. A memoir of a guy trying to relive an adventurous part of his youth, before he sells out to a middle aged mundane life. In stead of getting details about where to stay, where to eat, what to see... you get an impression. To me, this was vastly more interesting than a list of who-what-where.

You hear snippets of Katz... well, read A Walk in the Woods to learn more about Bryson's friend, reminds me of Seinfeld's Kramer. To Bryson's credit, he doesn't try to polish his story, or try to make himself out as anything he is not. He just tells it like it is. If anything, Bryson encourages armchair tourists to get out and live a little.

While reading this book stirred in me a desire to travel to every single place mentioned, regardless of whether the author liked the place or not, it's not a great story. The book is interesting, but not because of the writing. In fact, it's interesting in spite of the writing. This book contains a lot of, "I went to my hotel, then I got coffee, and then I took a walk," -type of sentences. And I rigorously disagree with the reviewer who called the book "riotously funny." It certainly held a few chuckles, and more than a few smiles, but this book will not leave you with tears running down your face. In fact, the practice of ending paragraphs by going for the laugh grew somewhat tiring and quickly became predictable. That said, if you have a desire to travel, whether you've been to the places visited by the author or not, or have ever dreamed of picking up and just going somewhere, anywhere, this book is recommended, if only because it makes the dream seem possible.

Bill Bryson is to embellishment like a hammer is to a nail. They go together.

Slamming his typical sarcastic wit to the sights, sounds, smells and situations throughout his European travels, Bryson rivets the reader with an imbibed smile. Swallow it down. This is humor at its sneering finest.

I've never had a desire to go to Europe. Just never have. Still don't. But to read of Bryson's experiences and the way he details it, makes for a fun read. Sure there is exaggeration and ridicule, so what? This is what makes life enjoyable.

Some can not take embellishment or fault-finding humor (evidently they missed out on the laugh chromosome when born or developed that way later in life). Sad. They are missing out. What a dull, gray existence if one can not laugh at themself or get a chuckle from observing others. Might as well live in a cave. Which nowadays many seem to do.

Anyway, if there is anyone to bring a smile within the pages of a book, it is Bill Bryson.

I have read and enjoyed most of Bryson's books. Can't tell you how many times I've read A Short History. I own a couple of his books about words and language and have read one or two that I wish I had kept.

Neither Here Nor There is his funniest. Much funnier than Dave Barry, who is nowhere near as funny as his reputation. Sorry, Dave.

Bryson copyrighted Neither Here Nor There in 1991. That's 21 years ago. Therefore all the information is totally out of date.

But it's delightfully written. I often laughed out loud -- hard.

So read it.

I'm a long time fan of Bryson, so picking up any book by him is like getting a warm email from an old friend. I've also traveled extensively through Europe, much of which solo, so I had a deep appreciation for his experiences. I wonder if this was my first Bryson experience, or I had not traveled to the places he visited (or had traveled much at all) would I like this book as much as I did? Perhaps not. But for Bryson fans, and world travelers, take this on the plane during your next 7+hour journey. It may be two decades old, but, well, not much has changed, shall we say.

It helps to already be a Bryson fan, but if you are new to the joys of reading his books, settle in, and enjoy. Bryson has been an outsider himself, having lived in England for many years. He moved back to the USA after two decades, tried it for a while, and moved back to England. He knows about being a stranger in a strange land. When he makes observation on the eccentricities, endearing qualities, advantages, and frustrating foibles of the places he visits (including those in the USA), he does it with humor, intelligence, a satirical bent, a very precise eye,insight--and did I say, humor? You will laugh out loud at least once. The paperback is inexpensive, the enjoyment immense.

Bill Bryson is one, if not THE, funniest author of our time!

I am now the proud owner (and protector) of ALL of Bryson's travel memoirs and have read and re-read them more times than I care to mention.

There is one BIG PROBLEM though. They are TOO funny. The sudden outbursts of belly laughs. The loud snorts of hilarity. Sometimes loud enough to frighten little children and old ladies, not to mention spouses and strangers in a park.

I was even accused of contributing to the delinquency of a highly educated adult by an annoyed spouse who was so disgusted by his wife's fits of giggles that he said..."why are you reading such a vacuous book?" He'll never, ever be able to understand unless he finally breaks down and reads a Bill Bryson Book.

Now that Bryson has moved back to the U.K. after leaving New Hampshire and been appointed Chancellor of Durham University in the U.K. he hasn't chronicled a new travel memoir in quite a while.

I've emailed him via his Facebook page begging him to "hit the road" but to no avail.

I guess I'll just have to start all over again at the beginning and re-read one of my favorite Bryson books, "Neither Here Nor There".

Although the book is loosely based on Bryson's old and new travels through Europe, you learn remarkably little about the continent. This is because Mr Bryson himself is too preoccupied with high cost of orange juice in hotels and memories of his teenage travels with a flatulence-happy friend to notice anything of interest.
Shallow anti-German and anti-Austrian outbursts do not add value to the book, and neither do annoying complaints about the costs of food in Scandinavia. Firstly, Mr Bryson is hardly a man who finds it difficult to afford a pizza anywhere in the world, secondly, his leftist admiration of extravagant social provision in Denmark somehow does not translate into understanding where all the money comes from.
This is a funny book, but you cannot help noticing that there was no need for Mr Bryson to travel to Europe: he could have produced something equally funny from his weekend trip to a supermarket or car dealer.

Bill Bryson does make fun of the cultures he encounters in this book. Yep, on just about every page. But guess what? He also makes fun of his own native culture, America (for an entire book of Bryson poking fun at the oddities of American culture, see "I'm A Stranger Here Myself") and of the UK, the country that he adopted as his own for 20 years. No, Bill Bryson is not a xenophobe: he makes fun of everyone equally, and he does it in a way which makes it obvious that he is in loving awe of the differences that can occur amongst members of the same species depending on where/how/by whom they were raised.

This book has two personalities to it- the involved tourist and the observational tourist. Bryson spends some time recalling the previous trek he took across Europe in the 1970's with his friend (of "A Walk in the Woods" notoriety) when he was much more involved in what was going on around him. He communicated with the people and the culture of the places he visited. During his return visit, 20 years later as a lone middle-aged tourist, he was less involved and chose to merely peer through the glass at the places he visited; this part of the story involves a lot of "I went from here to here, I couldn't find a hotel, the last bus had left, no one spoke English," etc etc. While this aspect of the book might not be as fun to read as Bryson's misadventures from other books, it is endearing because it is real. This is not a book that gushingly romanticizes travel, rather it is one witty, sarcastic man's take on the people and cultures that he encountered, both in the 1990's as a middle aged American expat, and in the 1970's as a curious 20-something backpacker. My favorite Bryson book.

First, let me say I'm a Bill Bryson fan.
His "A Walk In The Woods" and "In a Sunburnt Country" were brilliant, witty, informative and thoroughly entertaining. They were, in short, everything this book is not.
"Neither Here Nor There" is a travellogue with the emphasis on log. What we get is a listing of the author's various motels, transportation and meals in different European cities. This book is heavy on the actual travel and accomodations and very light on the places he's visiting. In other books, Bryson would tell the story of the place, livening up his observations with fascinating tidbits of history and curiousities that made most of the places interesting in themselves. In this book, the places seem just an excuse for him to ride the train or bus, change hotels, and drink beer and eat.
There are a few -- disappointingly few -- laugh out loud moments in the book. On the whole, the witicisms and wry observations are replaced by overly long descriptive sentences.
This book was written before some of his more recent successes. The earlier Bryson doesn't compare well with the current model. I'd skip it (and "Notes From a Small Island" which suffers from some of the same deficiencies) and go to his other books if one is looking for the enjoyable Bryson reads.

I read Neither Here Nor There a week after returning from my inter-rail trip around Europe, at the same age as Bryson was and with a friend...who is nothing like Katz. This book just captured so many of my experiences as a European traveller, and as a European. He is spot on about so many things, particularly France, Austria and Germany. Indeed the similarities were almost uncanny when he talks about the hotel he stayed in on his honeymoon which he was distraught to find is now a Holiday Inn. We walked past this hotel in question every day from our hotel around the corner!! A fantastically funny read- the right length - or the stereotypes could become grating - if they weren't so correct most of the time.

Bill Bryson

Neither Here nor There
Travels in Europe

Harper Perennial, Paperback, 2001
8vo. 254 pp.

First published, 1992.

Contents

1. To the North
2. Hammerfest
3. Oslo
4. Paris
5. Brussels
6. Belgium
7. Aachen and Cologne
8. Amsterdam
9. Hamburg
10. Copenhagen
11. Gothenburg
12. Stockholm
13. Rome
14. Naples, Sorrento, and Capri
15. Florence
16. Milan and Como
17. Switzerland
18. Liechtenstein
19. Austria
20. Yugoslavia
21. Sofia
22. Istanbul
Index

============================================

It's only fair that I should start this rambling in the same way as I started the book: from the last but one chapter.

For me, purely personally, by far the most interesting part of the book was chapter 21, because it is dedicated to the town in which I was born and raised. The chapter's a real riot to read, at few points the laughter becomes almost dangerously intense. As far as I can say, for I was about ten years old at the time, Mr Bryson has captured the atmosphere of the devastating crisis from the early 1990s very convincingly. His description of the town in the early 1970s, during the height of the Communist rule, is stupendously funny but, from all I've heard from my parents, very accurate and even perceptive as well:

"I remembered Sofia being a city of broad boulevards so empty of traffic that people walked down the middle of them, stepping aside only to make room for the occasional Zill limousine carrying party functionaries to some dark, Orwellian ministry. I have never been in a more timeless city. It could have been any time in the last forty of fifty years. There were simply no clues to suggest what decade it was; the shape of the few cars in the road, the clothes people wore, the looks of the shops and buildings were all curiously uniformed in fashion."

"Sofia had an enormous department store called TSUM, [...] spread over five floors and containing not a single product that it looked as if it had been produced more recently than 1938."

Though I am pleased with Mr Bryson's claim that Sofia without any doubt has the most beautiful women in Europe, I have to say that I have never been able to notice that myself.

Of course many things in Sofia have changed out of recognition since the early 1990s. For better or for worse is a debatable question, but I guess Mr Bryson would not even recognise the city today. That's why the final paragraph of his Chapter 21 is unusually perceptive:

"My guess is that communism in Bulgaria won't last. It can't last. No people will retain a government that can't feed them or let them provide toys for their children. I'm certain that if I come back to Sofia in five years it will be full of Pizza Huts and Laura Ashleys, and the streets will be clogged with BMWs, and all the people will be much happier. I can't blame them a bit, but I'm glad I saw it before it changed."

I don't know whether my admiration for Mr Bryson's "Sofia chapter" is not due more to sentimental reasons than to any literary value or author's perspicacity, but one thing is sure: Sofia is a dead dull city in which there is hardly anything worth seeing. It's a vastly different matter to visit some of the greatest European capitals like Paris, Rome and Vienna. And here the real value of Mr Bryson's book surfaces all too obviously.

After reading A Short History of Nearly Everything, I have learnt not to expect much from Bill Bryson. And he delivers the same, if not worse, pulp non-fiction here: sometimes dull but often hilarious, with very occasional flash of insight but with a good many comments so pedestrian that one wonders how he had the audacity to publish them. Of course he is wonderfully readable and he often makes me laugh my head off - which are considerable virtues by far not every writer is endowed with - but what else is there to justify the existence of that book? Very little as it turned out.

The story is simple and effective enough, and it pretends to be all true. In 1972, the very young, enthusiastic and charming Bill Bryson wandered through Europe. Some two decades later the middle-aged, whining and exasperating Bill Bryson repeated the stunt and, inexplicably, decided to write a book about it. From time to time some travel companion of his appears too, and he is one of those enchanting personalities who feel compelled to use the word [the store censorship!] every second sentence. Bryson himself almost never stops complaining: about people, about hotels, about buses, about restaurants, about bars, about... you get the picture, don't you? His arrogance is of cosmic proportions and so is his vanity; he is cocksure about everything and seldom - if ever - does it occur to him that there might be other point of view but his own. Bill Bryson is the chap who knows, everything about anything everywhere in Europe, most often in a compulsively derisive tone. Rarely does he allow himself to show some appreciation, let alone affection, for the cities he visited or the people he met. But his pages are packed with trivia, most of it badly dated, and sweeping generalisations which are obviously based on a very limited experience and can be called ''perceptive'' only by abusing the word. Instead, Mr Bryson's devastating sarcasm pervades pretty much every paragraph. It is generally very amusing, if caustic, but it sometimes is crude, overdone, heavy going and just short of obscene as well.

So why on earth did Bill Bryson write that book at all? It is no travel guide, to be sure, for there is not enough specific information, but since such books age quickly, this is all for the better. Nor is Mr Bryson concerned with more than a very perfunctory glance at the European history, philosophy or art. To do him justice, I would suppose that he wrote that book with no other aim but to provide a solid dose of fun - otherwise the volume would hardly worth the paper it's printed on.

There is a lot of fun here all right. But there's a lot of arrogance, inanity, ignorance and even bigotry, too.

Let's start with the fun, shall we? It is not an especially intelligent amusement and a great deal of it might well be fictional, but it makes one laugh, or at least such episodes certainly make me laugh:

"...a waitress named Shirley who was the most unpleasant person I have ever met. Whatever you ordered, she would look as if you just asked to borrow her car to take her daughter to Tijuana for filthy weekend."

"In the evening I went looking for a restaurant. This is often a problem in Germany. For one thing, there's a good chance that there will be three guys in lederhosen playing polka music, so you have to look carefully through the windows and question the proprietor closely to make sure that Willi and the Bavarian Boys won't bound onto a little stage at half past eight, because there is nothing worse than being just about to tuck into your dinner, a good book propped in front of you, only to find yourself surrounded by ruddy-faced Germans waving beer steins and singing the ''Horst Wessel Lied'' for all they're worth. It should have been written in the armistice treaty that the Germans would be required to lay down their accordions along with their arms."

"The best thing that could be said about travelling abroad with Katz was that it spared the rest of America from having to spend the summer with him."

"...I spied a coin under the seat in front of me, and with protracted difficulty leaned forward and snagged it. When I sat up, I saw my seatmate was at last looking at me with that ominous glow.
''Have you found Jesus?'' he suddenly asked.
''Uh, no, it's a quarter,'' I answered and quickly settled down and pretended for the next six hours to be asleep, ignoring his whispered entreaties to let Christ build a bunkhouse in my heart."

That said, and quoted, a great deal of the book is actually too dull to be funny. Mr Bryson's endless curiosity about the commonplace and the mundane is to my mind devastatingly wearisome. I do not wish to put on any airs and sound like some lousy intellectual snob, for I am neither intellectual nor a snob, but I am often astonished at the impossible crap that Mr Bryson thought worthy of writing, not to mention publishing. Last but not least, Mr Bryson is also prone to awkward and rather self-indulgent digressions: in the middle of Belgium he thinks it necessary to reflect why cows are the perfect pets as far as he is concerned, and while walking through the streets of Cologne he feels compelled to lecture us about the invasion of Japanese electronics into the Western world. Thank you, Bill, your enthusiasm to inflict your opinions of cows and electronics is much appreciated, but I'd rather do without either.

Now let's have a look at the saddest part of all. We may start with Vienna. Sometimes Mr Bryson does tend to be appallingly crass, and the case of Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum is a perfect example. After giving his stupefyingly superficial description - "fabulous - vast, grand, full of great paintings" - Mr Bryson explores in detail the "commendable" system with information cards for visitors in every hall, complains that the museum is much too big and finally gives some of the greatest junk I have ever read about anything:

"...I was suffering from museum fatigue. In these circumstances, especially when I have paid a fortune to get in and feel that there are still a couple of hours standing between me and my money's worth, I find myself involuntarily supplying captions to the pictures: ''Salome, on being presented the head of John the Baptist on a salver saying: "No, I ordered a double cheeseburger," or an exasperated Saint Sebastian whining, "I'm warning you guys, the next person who shoots an arrow is going to be reported."

Well, Bill, this is the perfect thing to say when, after twelve hard hours of strenuous tourism, you're sitting in a cozy bar sipping your fourth cocktail late in the evening. But it is definitely not something that deserves to be printed.

When he is in Paris, Mr Bryson is so desperate that the Louvre is crowded that he tells us amazing stories about how terrible the traffic in the French capital is and then goes on into considerable, and intolerable, detail how his travel companion had twice become a victim of bird [the store censorship!]. And do you know what was the only picture in the Louvre that Bill Bryson remembered from his last visit and very much wanted to see again? One that showed two ladies, one of whom had casually put a finger into the other's "fundament"!

Give me a break, Bill, will you!

Now, I am all for flippancy on every page and tongue-in-cheek narrative all the time, but inanity and vulgarity I cannot possibly tolerate, especially from a man who spends several days in each of Europe's grandest capitals and is supposed to be fairly intelligent. Nobody expects Mr Bryson to be a witty kind of Baedecker, much less a walking history of art, but some sensitivity to and seriousness about matters other than sleeping, eating, drinking and [the store censorship!] would be much appreciated. Moreover, in addition to being a sex maniac and a philistine, Bill Bryson is an awful prig as well:

"I don't think I can altogether forgive the Germans their past, not as long as I can wonder if that friendly old waiter who brings me my coffee might once have spent his youth bayoneting babies or herding Jews into gas ovens. Some things are so monstrous as to be unpardonable. But I don't see how anyone could go to Germany now and believe for a moment that that could ever happen again. The Germans are becoming the new Americans - rich, ambitious, hardworking, health-conscious, sure of their place in the world."

The last two sentences are typical for most of Mr Bryson's positive comments: ambiguous and condescending, reeked of insincerity, added as if only to preserve some sense of decorum. One wonders if Mr Bryson could ever forgive the Spaniards the Inquisition, Rome the Crusades, the French people the French Revolution or his fellow Americans the Indian wars.

Not only is Mr Bryson a prig, but he is also a prude, as shown on the main train station in Cologne:

"And then I saw something that gave me an instant urge to get out of there. It was a non stop porno movie house, and quite gross one at that, to judge from the candid glossy pictures on display by the ticket booth. The movie house was in the station, one of the services permitted to travelers by the thoughtful management of Deutsche Bundesbahn, the national railway company. I don't know precisely why, but I found this hugely repellent. I have no special objection to pornography, but in a train station? There was just something so seedy about the idea of a businessman stopping off at the end of the day to watch twenty minutes of bonking before catching the 5:40 to his home and family in Bensberg, and there was something seedier still in the thought of a national railway endorsing it."

This from a man who fantasises about stewardess and couchettes during a long bus travel, falls in love (read "lust") with innocent receptionists, is convinced that some dogs want to have sex with him and walks through the Red Lights district of Amsterdam giving us detailed descriptions of sex shop windows and covers of pornographic magazines. Had Mr Bryson had a little common sense more, he might have reflected that the "repellent" practice of Deutsche Bahn actually shows a very keen understanding of human nature. Needless to say, it never even occurs to Mr Bryson that the "seedy" story with the businessman might well be a product of his own sick imagination. I have to say that I am sorry for having missed that porn cinema last time when I was passing through Cologne. It might have been removed since those loose times when Mr Bryson wandered through Europe.

It is true that sometimes Mr Bryson manages to convey a very genuine imitation of enthusiasm, which is almost touching actually, but that happens all too rarely in the maelstrom of inspired nonsense. One such exception from the usual crappy stuff is the awe Mr Bryson obviously felt as he entered St Peter in Rome:

"St. Peter doesn't look all that fabulous from the outside, at least not from the piazza on its foot, but step inside and it is so sensational that your mouth falls open. St. Peter is a marvel, so vast and beautiful and cool and filled with treasures and airy heights and pale beams of heavenly light that you don't know where to place your gaze. It is the only building I have ever entered where I have actually felt like sinking to my knees, clasping my hands heavenward, and crying: ''Take me home, Lord.'' No structure on earth would ever look the same to me again."

I wish there had been more passages like this one. But there aren't. What is more, they are used as lame excuses for Mr Bryson's indolence, or lack of interest perhaps, or I don't know what. Certainly his dismissal of the Sistine Chapel and the museums of Vatican is downright mind-boggling:

"...then went to the Sistine Chapel and the museums, and they were naturally impressive, but I confess that all the other visual experiences were largely wasted on me after the spacious grandeur of St. Peter's."

"Impressive"? Is that all your brain can produce, Bill? Obviously. All that Mr Bryson has to say about the famous "Pieta" of Michelangelo, surely one of the greatest masterpieces in the history of European art, is that he ''had a look'' at it and it was behind a barrier and a glass screen which kept visitors too far away. I rest my case.

In short, highly enjoyable but perfectly forgettable read. One laughs a great deal while reading it, but after the last page there is a feeling of curious intellectual blankness. I cannot honestly give one star to a book which is so readable and makes me laugh so much, especially one that has obviously been designed for nothing more. But I cannot honestly give it more than two stars either, for great part of it is occupied by the egotism, vulgarity and stupidity of the author. The man has the inestimable gift of great readability, moronic stuff and all. He is not entirely devoid of brains or a sense of humour either. Sadly, the former is all too seldom used, and the latter is severely marred by his triviality and his vulgarity. All that reduces his book to a guilty pleasure, fleeting and useless. I surmise one is unwise to expect more from Bill Bryson.

I love travelogues, but I've never read any of Bryson's books, so I can't say whether it's one of his best or not. But on its own merits, I enjoyed the writing and his views of the different parts of Europe. He comes up with some wonderful metaphors, and the book held my interest throughout. At age 42, I no longer feel I have to read every word of a book--life's too short, so skip the parts you don't care about--but I did read every word of this one.
BUT--on the last page, when he decides to go home, he reveals that his wife is pregnant again and he really thinks maybe he ought to get back. WHAT??!! What kind of lowdown leaves his pregnant wife and kids fending for themselves while he gallivants around Europe for a couple months? What kind of idiot woman stays married to such a schmuck? I lost all respect for Bryson then and there.
But still, you can't deny the writing is good and enjoyable. So read it, just skip the last page. :)

In the early 1970s, when he was twenty, Bryson left Iowa for a summer of wandering around Europe. He enjoyed it so much, he did it again the next summer. Then he actually moved to England and took up residence in his career as a journalist, though he somehow didn't manage to see much more of the Continent. Twenty years after his first wanderjahr, he had a hankering to do it yet again, hitting as many of the original sights as possible, just to compare notes with his earlier self. The result is a sometimes witty, sometimes annoying tale of a middle-aged monolingual man's impressions of what happened to the Europe he first fell in love with, but which was discovered by American capitalism in the interim. Starting in Hammerfest, the northernmost town in Europe (he wanted to view the northern lights), he makes his way in fits and starts through Scandinavia in the early Spring (which he doesn't much like), Paris (which he loves though he doesn't much care for the people who actually live there), the Low Countries (Amsterdam isn't what it was), back to Copenhagen and Stockholm (mostly expensively disappointing), and finally to Rome by plane because he missed the sun. He loves the Eternal City, Capri, and Italy generally, with the exception of Milan (which apparently isn't Italian enough). He loves the scenery in Switzerland but doesn't care much for the Swiss. He doesn't particularly approve of Zurich or Geneva, either. And he makes it clear several times that German is a funny-sounding language and that German menus are dangerous to order from because you never know what weird dish you might get. He seems to like Yugoslavia, mostly because of its primitiveness and because it isn't crammed with tourists -- and he really dotes on Sofia, which is just strange. On the other hand, he doesn't like Istanbul at all.

Bryson is the sort of traveler who actually enjoys wandering by himself through a strange town, not understanding a word anyone says, not knowing the local mores. Apparently, he likes being a stranger -- The Other. I prefer knowing what I'm doing, understanding what's happening, appreciating what I'm looking at. I hate discovering, six months after returning home, that there was someplace I would have made every effort to visit, had I only known it was there. Anyway. Though he can be amusing, Bryson comes across as a bit of an Ugly American. Or Ugly Adopted Yorkshireman, or whatever. He tends to make wisecracks based on ignorance, such as making fun of the fact that Norway (in 1991) required motorists to drive with their headlights on, even in the sunniest weather. He considers this not only pointless but "surreal" -- although the practice now, fifteen years later, is widely recommended in the U.S. and (yes) required by law in some areas. So much for European backwardness.

Listen...stop trying to find comparisons with 'The Lost Continent'...this is a different kind of travel experience .Bryson, with a little help from Katz, tells it like it is.If you have ever travelled much in Europe you will identify will Brysons' comments.Ok, he does generalise a little but ..well... its true !Italians are like that ! Ditto Germans/Swiss/Scandanavians.More compact than his other books, I can read this in one sitting and I always take it along if I am going to visit somewhere mentioned in the book, and then look to see what Bryson has said about it .Non-Europeans may make heavy weather of some parts but persevere , its well worth it !

Okay...not the best of his.
Sometimes he seems to be pushing the exaggeration, and perhaps this is one of those times.
Still, his sense of humor, his love of people, adventure, and life, and his ability to stand aside and see things from his own unique perspective shines through.

I shouldn't like this book. I should hate this book. I should complain,deride and denounce this book because every time I read it, I wet my pants laughing. It should be illegal to make someone laugh so hard she wets her pants. It's embarrassing. This book is so addictive that I tend to pick it up wherever I see it. Since I am an avid reader, I pick it up in book stores and libraries. It's humiliating to be standing in a bookstore with your legs crossed and a warm stream of pee tickling down your thighs because you can't stop laughing. I should also be mad because Bill Bryson clearly stole all my experiences of travelling to Europe for the first time. I'm the one who couldn't understand the English language the way the English speak it, who thought they were angry when they said they were "pissed" and didn't know it meant "drunk." I'm the one who spent the night trying to figure out what I was supposed to do with the window because the innkeeper told me, "Fold the pane." Bryson stole all my material. The only reason I'm not mad is because he writes it all so beautifully, weaving the jokes into the story into the irony into the drama into the comedy, and does it so beautifully that this book disappears in hours when by rights it should take days to read because it is so full of experiences. I denounce Bill Bryson. Off with his head. Send him back to Europe, but please let him pack his pencil and his sense of humour before he goes. He is a national treasure.

I picked this book up on a whim. I found myself near the Travel section and it just called my attention. I had been wanting to get a travel memoir for a while, so I decided to follow my instinct and buy it and read it immediately. I am very glad I did.
Bryson's memoirs of his trip through Europe are incredibly funny and poignant. Interspersed throughout the narrative are stories from a 1972 trip he took with a "friend" named Stephen Katz which help to bring modern Europe into focus. Bryson, who at the time was living in England though he is American, has a bit of a "best of both worlds" kind of vision, which makes him able to see Europeans on their own terms, so to speak. The book covers a lot of ground, as Bryson travels from Scandinavia, through the usual staples of Western Europe, and ends up on the fringes of Europe, in Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Istanbul. Some of the places he visits I have visited myself, and in those cases it was fun to see how we each experienced the city (I am happy to report we share our opinion of Naples, namely Ugh!) and/or country; in those cases where he goes to places I have never been (and there are quite a few those), the fun is in both his stories and just the sheer fun of travel. As I said, Bryson is funny in a candid way; he has no problem telling you about how many times he got drunk, or the various times he gets completely taken for a fool, always with wit and humor. Travel memoirs usually include these little details, factoids, that make the places come alive, and Bryson, though not a scholar and not a travel guidebook writer, injects quite a few of them in, always with an eye to bring the destination to life through history and context. In the end, however, the book is excellent because it is a very heartfelt and honest travel memoir that takes you along as a companion. Anyone who has ever traveled can relate to it, especially if you have visited Europe and can chuckle silently (or loudly, as I did too many times to count) when you remember all those little quirks that are quintessentially European. On a personal level, memoirs like this help me to bring into focus my own trip to Europe, going on three years ago, and remind me of the joy of travel, of the joy of seeing new lands, of the joy of coming home ready to do it all, all over again. And that is something that I appreciate immensely.

I liked this book for what it was, one guy's experience of travelling around Europe by train. It is not a serious examination of European culture or an attempt to change his life. Having travelled in a similar way to him, some of his observations seemed spot on. The book feels dated, however.

He's one of my favorite authors but in this book Bill Bryson is a grouch. His travels seem pointless. There must have been more interesting things he could have written about than food and getting drunk and bad service.

I just returned from a Eurail trip, through Europe of all places, last week. I had never heard of Bill Bryson before I left, but I met this girl laughing out loud in a London Youth Hostel. She was reading Brysons book about travelling through the States and highly recommended it to me. Unfortunately I was on my way out of London that day and never got to a bookstore, but the name stuck in my mind. Four countries later (having looked in Spanish and Portugese bookstores) I was desperately in need of something more to read than my Let's Go and Thomas Cook (which I was near having completely memorized). Lucky for me I was in Gibraltar where I found a nice little english bookstore. Fortunately they didn't have "Travels...", but had this other book "Neither Here, Nor There." Since it was about Europe it only made sense to buy this book and have a go at it. Having just previously been or been close to all of the places he highlights, I absolutely busted a gut every time I read a chapter or two. I was throughly enjoying this book and looking forward to fininshing it in tandem with finishing my own trip, when something ironic occured in Italy. I had just been reading the chapter (laughing of course!) where Bryson gets pickpocketed in the Italian quarter of Switzerland; that night I was on a train to Rome when my backpack was nicked from underneath me. Despite losing really really important stuff, I also lost "Neither Here, Nor There." I couldn't help but think of Brysons similar situation which I had just read, thinking of this made my situation all the more funny, despite not being able to finish my trip. The main point here, although this is not your regular review format, is that Bryson is an extremely witty writer and right on in his assesment/observations of Europe and its people. Newsweek would say "Brillianly Funny!" I just say if you've been to Europe, or know anything about it, read this book. It doesn't matter if you've been to all the places or not, you'll still be crying by the end each chapter! One word of caution; if you take this book along and read it on your trip, he may rub off on you as you write in your own journal. You'll begin to see places through a slighlty distorted, although humorous, lens. I even started to write a bit like him. In any case enjoy, and happy travels! Oh yes, I would probably give this book a five star rating, but I still haven't read the last few chapters; so all I can say were that 4/5 of this book were excellent!

I was lucky enough to be able to interview Bill Bryson when this book came out, and the interview was for a literary magazine. I think people forget just how skillful good comic writing is. Humorous writers make it look so easy, but writing that can make you laugh out loud - and this does, on almost every page - has to be well-observed and sharply written. I also used to teach travel writing classes, and as well as using extracts from some of the more literary travel writers, like Bruce Chatwin and Paul Theroux, I also used extracts from this book, to encourage students to be more observational as they traveled the world. And in person Bill Bryson was charm itself, giving me several hours of his time, even though the interview was only for a tiny magazine.

Very funny travelog! Bryson retraces the steps of his summer trip in Europe in the late 1960s. Now he is older, and wiser, and offers a great deal of information about how Europe has changed, and how it has remained the same. Starting in Scandanavia, he travels around a great deal of the European continent. There were some countries he missed (I would have loved to hear what he said about Iberia, and Greece, and some more of the Eastern European states), but it was great fun to read. I found myself laughing out loud many times!
Recommended for anyone who loves travel and humor.

I definitely liked this sarcastic but warm book about solitary travels thru Europe, interlaced with fragments of a journey taken years earlier with a certain weirdo named Katz.

The glimpses into European culture are just great- how movie tickets are sold here, how food is served with attitude there. Also, there is great comedy in the scenes of being an odd duck in places like Lichtenstein and MIlan, but also rewarding beauty in Capri and Paris.

I wish two things: that there had been more about Katz, who is one of the most misanthropic figures I have come across in a while and that generally makes for good comedy; also, that the last three chapters hadn't felt quite so tired. I suspect that that is just a realistic impression of how the author did feel towards the end of his journey but it was anti-climactic.

I couldn't stop laughing while reading this book after a day-long meeting, back in my hotel room in England. I have travelled to Europe at least once a year, sometimes for business, most for holidays, for the past 10 years. The author's experiences, and impressions, of Europe match mine exactly. This book is a wonderful memoir for anyone who has travelled to Europe on a self-guided tour; it will remind them of what they've seen and done there. It is definitely not a travel "guide" book for people who intend to use the book for planning their trips.

I'm glad I read this book in the privacy of my own home. If I had been reading this in public, I would have been mistaken for one of those crazy people you see sitting at coffee shops and laughing hysterically by themselves.
This is the first book I have read by Bill Bryson, and I was completely impressed. As I was reading through this book, I had to keep myself from running back to the bookstore and buying his whole collection.
In "Neither Here Nor There" Bryson is reliving a journey he had taken through Europe in his youth. If you've ever been to Europe, you will deeply appreciate the sarcastic humor that Bryson uses to describe the people he meets and the places he visits.

PROS:
- Bryson's writing style is fluid and funny.

- Good coverage of Western Europe: 19 out of 22 chapters are on it.

CONS:
- The subtitle of the book is, "Travels in Europe", but it should have been called "Travels in Western Europe" since that's where 90% of the book takes place.

- Bryson has minimal interaction with Europeans, only interacting with the locals briefly, even though he traveled alone. He seems to travel with his guidebook in hand, looking at buildings, but not really spending much time getting to know the people. Part of that probably is that he doesn't speak a foreign language well.

- Not terribly informative.

CONCLUSION: Don't expect to learn that much about Europe, but do expect to laugh out loud. If those are your expectations, then you will love this book. I gave it 4 stars because it was so funny, so entertaining, that it overcame the flaws I listed.

I know that a few were turned off by Bryson's relentless criticism of just about every place he ventured. He rehashes many old stereotypes and prejudices. But, I guess that I should hate to admit, but I don't, I found it immensely amusing, and I know that much of it is based in fact. I think that many of his critics forget that he is trying to entertain more so than he is trying to educate - the point of this book is not to provide to the reader a travelogue with precise cultural detail - but to relate BB's impressions as he traveled Europe, and as BB is a humorist, you expect that humor to pervade his observations. I didn't find this particularly meanspirited.

Bill Bryson has a talent for turning his travel adventures into a humorous celebration of the obscure, the bizarre and the frustrating. He has a keen and often sarcastic eye for what will entertain the seasoned armchair traveler, and books like `Down Under' and `Notes from a Small Island' are filled with hilarious anecdotes and interesting insights into the areas he is exploring. Unfortunately `Neither Here nor There' is not as engaging or amusing as many of Bryson's other efforts, and seems like a rather hotch-potch attempt to fill a book with as many destinations as possible.

With around 25 destinations visited in `Neither Here nor There', Bryson does not have the time or room to exercise his trademark ability to unearth unusual facts and figures. He seems to rush around Europe and not greatly enjoy his travels, although a large beer and a big meal often appears to soothe his frazzled spirits. One thing that surprised me was that Bryson proudly refuses to learn even the most basic foreign phrases, which seems a little rude and ignorant. I started to suspect that this is partly because he relies upon language-barrier humor a little too much. He also does not meet with locals a great deal in this book, denying us the Bryson knack for meeting people who are either a little odd, or filled with fascinating information.

Although I did still enjoy parts of `Neither Here nor There' immensely, I found myself occasionally wanting to skip a chapter or two, which saddened me as I am a great admirer of many of Bryson's other books. I ended the book feeling I didn't know a great deal more about the cities he visited, and that the book was more an attempt to gather enough material for publication rather than a great travel story that needed to be shared.

Unless you're really into "humorous" stories about travelling gone awry, don't waste your money on this book. The theme of the aloof American traveller getting into a mess abroad with chattering, irrational foreigners is outmoded and trivial. Bryson is obnoxiously critical of Europeans and their ways, making this book, in spite of its occasional tolerably funny passages, one of the most ridiculous and unpalatable books I've read in a long while. I get the impression that Bryson the American feels he is always right and the childish Europeans are always wrong and immature.

I'm a travel enthusiast, or at least a dreaming-about-traveling enthusiast, so I picked up this book for a little summer "getaway" of my own. I read the whole book, but there were numerous times I put it down to absorb something shocking Bryson said or to read a particularly ridiculous passage to my boyfriend. Bryson is incredibly negative about every single place he goes to, the exceptions being Copenhagen, Amsterdam, and Italy (at least Rome and Sorrento). Bryson seems to direct most of his disappointment and, quite honestly, thinly veiled dislike of Germans and German-speaking countries, as well as most of northern Europe. It's not just that he bitches about train schedules, public workers, the sound of the German language, how terrible their food is (and all of this gets pretty annoying after awhile), it's that he seems to bring up the horror of WWII every chance he gets in the appropriate countries. He seemed to look at Germans as inferior, and was appalled that the old men he encountered could have been Nazis 50 years earlier. Good God! I didn't know I was settling in for a depressing and pretty judgmental portrait of central Europeans. This constant theme was tedious, as well as his blatant elitism. There was one lovely passage where Bryson speaks of the "typical" haughty manner of European service workers and writes that, in effect, these workers are inferior because they spend their lives waiting on other people, so clearly they aren't doing something important. Although Bryson is often sarcastic, this was not a sarcastic passage. It was appalling.
Oh, and the constant complaining about tourists and how they're ruining Italy, the Alps, and most other countries he went to is ridiculous, as he was among them.
The only positive thing I can say about this book is that there are some passages that are funny and had me giggling to myself. However, once I realized that the entire book was going to be about him bitching about every single place he went to, I just plowed through the rest of it as fast as I could to get it over with.

This was an enjoyable, undemanding read. At his best, Bryson is grouchily funny, though not as hilarious IMO as some other reviews would have you believe. He is better when describing the rough spots of travel than its pleasures. At times, an unattractive whining tone takes over - for instance, when he complains how a particular location, like Florence, is overrun by tourists. But I'd be lying if I didn't admit to finding his skewering of the Swiss and the Austrians pretty much on target.

Three stars, because Bryson never approaches the level of a travel writer like Jan Morris, whose essays are infinitely superior.

Many of the negative reviews of this book point out that more often than not Bryson goes of on complaint tangents about a slew of things about his travels. I must agree with these critics. It seems obvious that if you don't like the bizzarity of red-light districts don't peruse them or if you don't want to spend an uncomfortable pair of days on a bus bound for the outer reaches of Norway don't board the bus. Simple as that! Yet Bryson does these things and finds fault with them. I believe that may have something to do with America and maybe only Americans can understand this. We are a country who, for many of us, love complaining more than not. We are not stoics. We are commenters and fault-finders. In this manner I can indentify with Bryson as I myself have been a traveller in Europe and frequently felt the same way. Another negative that stopped me from giving all the stars to this finely written book is Bryson's pervasive hate of industrialism or mass commercialism and mass tourism. I'm sorry to say it, but if we take a quick peek at the recent history of Europe we see that it may have never been the storybook/postcard destination that Bryson envisions. Maybe he had such a hard time finding his perfect Europe because its a figment of his imagination. Let's take a peek at this history- for the first half of the last Europe was rocked by the two most devestating wars ever- before that Europe experienced fifty years of instability as revolutions came and were violently supressed in nearly every country-before that were the massive invasions of Napoleon-before that was a country were you were luck to live to your twentieth birthday and not be killed by Europe's world-famous crowd diseases that spawned from Europe's history of pure squallor and lack of anything that we would today recognize as sanitization. Now Bryson complains about the culture sapping American-style commerialism and disneylandish style tourism. If that Europe's biggest problem all Europeans and travellers should thank thier lucky stars when comparing this with Europe's past history. The Europe Bryson wants is elusive in that Europe may never have been the perfect combination of unseemly commercialism and sanitation that it appears he wants. I gave the book four stars because it is one the few books that I read that made me laugh out loud. It is extremelly well written. Bryson's sense of humor even during the complaint sessions is amazing. I suggest anybody who has ever even thought of Europe to read this immediately.

I always enjoy reading Bill Bryson's books, but this was a little disappointing. I have the same mixed feelings about the book as he does the places he's describing. He moves around too quickly, and although he seems to have a good "feel" for the cities etc. he visits, they are inevitably a bit superficial. Indeed, some of his observations are flawed. For example, he must be joking when he says that, "the Italians technological contribution to humankind stopped with the pizza oven". A typical Anglo-Saxon stereotype, and, as it happens wildly inaccurate: the Italians are fine engineers, and....what about Marconi, for example?
I also found his (Anglo-Saxon) "can't (won't) speak the language" attitude rather irritating. With a little more effort, perhaps he might have done better.

If you're looking for a travel book to use when you explore Europe, this one won't be the most useful book out there. But if you are looking for entertainment, want to learn a bit about Europe and are prepared to laugh uproariously, this is a great choice. Bryson skewers the traditions and habits of other countries, recounts many hilarious experiences during his travels and describes some of the best (and worst) destinations in Europe. He has a fine writing style, casual, breezy and unique. The section on waiting for The Northern Lights to appear - and waiting and waiting for days on end - was worth the price of the book alone.

I can honestly say that I really did not enjoy this book in the slightest. I was excited to read my first Bill Bryson novel, but after a couple of chapters he became repetitive and extremely dull. The book consists of Bill getting on various trains, arriving in a European city, complaining about the people and the price of a hotel and then him going to try and find a place to eat that would evidently always be closed.

It took me months to get through this "light read" and I really wish I had never started it. I found this book to be a waste of time and money. Unless you want to be put to sleep, in which case buy away.

This is my favorite of Bill Bryson's books. He covers much of Western Europe here and simultaneously celebrates and pokes fun at the strange and unusual things people do. His way of interjecting history in the middle of a travel narrative is masterful, and his descriptions make you wish you were riding the train on the seat behind him, seeing what he sees or strolling with him along a narrow pedestrian street into a cafe and seeing the scene with his discerning eye.

Yes, it's raunchy in parts, but the overarching quality of this book is HILARITY! I have yet to pick up a Bryson book and not laugh myself into a stupor. If you want more of Bill, try A Walk in the Woods and I'm a Stranger Here Myself.

The first time I read this book I was on an Amtrack heading toward Seattle. I only made it to page 30 than I had to put it away. I was laughing so much, the people around me were becoming annoyed. Bill Bryson's work belongs right up there with Ted Simon and Sean Condon, all who have the ability to make you laugh, think and become a part of their adventures. I strongly recommend this book for anyone who has traveled, and for those of you that have not traveled, read this book, buy a ticket to anywhere and try living a bit.

You will laugh so hard you will embarrass yourself. Bill Bryson is the best. His experiences with the strange behavior of Europeans just brings me back to my days as a student abroad. This book, like all of Bryson's, is meant for the English-speaking public. I can't imagine it would translate. His prose is desperately funny. I think this one is my favorite.

I bought this book in Heathrow while waiting for my plane to Boston. Some indefinite time later I was surprised to find myself landing. This book is brilliant! While not intended for a serious traveler this is great for anybody who's been to Europe, especially for those who have traveled lightly, never staying in any one place more than several days. My experience is in many ways similar to that of Mr. Bryson, and while I'm not as sarcastic as he is, I can attest that in most cases he is right on target. This is a great study of why most stereotypes are so persistent - that's because for the large part they are true! What really surprised me, however, was Mr. Bryson's style - he effortlessly combines humorous dialog and some obviously contrived stories with great, almost poetic (Northern Lights, for instance) descriptions of places he's seen. Not many writers posses his skill. For those who did not like this book - lighten up, folks - this is not your average "two thumbs up" trip to Disney Land. Thanks a lot for this great and very funny book.

It is clear to anyone reading this book that Bryson knows nothing about Europe, but therein lies its charm. The thing is filled with memorable one liners and hilarious set pieces; checking out of a Copenhagen hotel springs to mind, as does his gracious departure from a restaurant in Italy to make way for some small time mobsters. Those looking for 'Baedeker'-style detail will be disappointed, but Bryson's perspective on this odd continent is fresh and enjoyable.

Bryson's best book is "Notes From a Small Island," about traveling in Great Britain. It's one of the funniest books I've read. The British are funny, and Bryson knows them well after living in Britain for 20+ years.
His book about Australia, "In a Sunburned Country," is also entertaining. He studied Australian history, met many interesting locals, etc. After reading it, I feel like an expert on Australia and its people.
His book about Europe, "Neither Here Nor There," isn't so good. The problem is that he speaks no languages other than English. He didn't talk to anyone on this trip. Wwithout any characters (other than Bryson) the book isn't engaging. The book has only one joke, which he repeats: "The waiter/hotel clerk/taxi driver didn't speak English so I tried to make him understand that I needed..." Some of these moments are quite funny, but they don't constitute a book. Bryson didn't study the places he visits. Unlike the Australian book, you learn almost nothing about the countries he visited.
Bryson's book about America, "I'm a Stranger Here Myself," failed to make me laugh. It reads like a series of Erma Bombeck columns. Bryson comments about various aspects of his life in a small town in New England. Not other people's lives, which might have been interesting, but only about his domestic life.
I got only a few chapters into his book about the Appalachian Trail, "A Walk in the Woods." I wasn't amused that two people with no backpacking experience would attempt a six-month hike. After several chapters of Bryson repeating one joke -- "I know nothing about any of this!" -- I stopped reading.
This suggests that the old advice "write about what you know" is worth following. It also made me realize that traveling is only enjoyable if you do two things: meet interesting people, preferably by speaking their language; and studying the area you're visiting.
Review by Thomas David Kehoe, author of "Hearts and Minds: How Our Brains Are Hardwired for Relationships"

I really did laugh out loud at times. Bryson tells of travels in Europe both of recent times and flashbacks to a trip through Europe when he was younger. I especially enjoyed the parts on places of Europe that I have visited myself. I was a little disappointed there wasn't much time spent in Germany. In this book, Bryson seems to try and get laughs at the expense of people. I had to knock off a star for that.

Just finished reading this, I thought it was very funny. I thought the ending felt a bit speedy, like he was late on his deadline, but overall I'd recommend it for those who like travel books, especially about Europe.

This is by far the funniest book I've read in a long time and everyone I've lent my copy too has loved it. It is even funnier if you've already read A Walk in The Wood because Bryson retells many delightfully funny misadverntures with Katz from his first trip around Europe. I would warn you, do not read this in the company of others as you will not be able to keep from laughing out loud - and I don't mean snickering, I mean full out guffaws. BUY THIS BOOK!

In this book travel writer Bill Bryson wrote about a whirlwind trip through Europe that seemed designed solely to give him something to write about rather than a journey he actually wanted to take. I didn't take notes so Bryson's stops in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Lichtenstein, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Austria, Italy, etc. blended together into a continuous blur of traveling, finding hotels, walking around, looking at things, eating, drinking, and so on. I could hardly distinguish one city from another.

Bryson's observations are meant to be humorous (and sometimes are) but they're almost always snide and critical. Again and again Bryson complains that the cities he visited were dirty and filled with litter, had menus he couldn't read; served bad food that cost too much; harbored surly, unhelpful or purposely obstructive service workers (clerks, waiters, hotel staff); sported poor transportation with inconvenient schedules; wouldn't accept whatever kind of money he happened to have; allowed panhandlers in the streets; sold useless merchandise; and on and on and on.

Bryson has a (probably well-deserved) animus toward Germany for the Holocaust and Austria for electing a former Nazi to be president - but his extreme hostility is a jarring note in what's supposed to be an entertaining romp. The book is also heavy with sexual innuendos, has numerous comments about prostitutes, describes lots of excessive drinking, and contains 'dirty' language that's off-putting in the context of a light-hearted travel story (and I'm no prude).

On the positive side Bryson's descriptions of some of the sights he sees are interesting: the northern lights, museums, parks, historic sites, artworks, and so on. Still, I had to force myself to finish and was glad when he finally went home. Not one of Bryson's best efforts.

Although Bill Bryson books are very popular (and deservedly so!), what originally prompted me to read one was a comment in a review of John Donoghue's book called Shakespeare My Butt! which likened John's style of writing and humor to that of Bill's. Since I'd enjoyed John's hilariously funny book so much, which is in part about his own escapades around the strangely named places in the North East of England, I thought I would give one of Bill's books a go too. I was certainly not disappointed. What a great book `Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe' is.

It chronicles Bill's escapades as a solo traveler around Europe in a hilariously funny way. Being pick-pocketed in Florence, food ordering dilemmas in Germany, hotel nightmares in Luxembourg, lethal motorists in Paris, and more - much more. It's all in there, and we've all been through similar situations too on our own travels. Bill's observation of Europe is spot-on, and the wit that he uses to relate his traveling experiences to his audience takes no prisoners. It's pure comic genius and certainly had me laughing.

Now the only problem is that I can't decide who my favorite author is, John or Bill - so I guess they will both have to take joint pride of place on my bookshelf!

I read this book shortly after my study abroad trip to Rome. I found Bryson to be very humorous and laughed out loud numerous times. I enjoyed the book while i read it in about 3 days flat.

My only issues when getting further along was when he obviously began to be homesick. He would pick on each location and pick apart what problems they had and complain about it. After a while he just became cranky and made you almost want to quit reading the book. He rushed through his trip near the end and it was sloppy.

Although a good amount of what he said still applies today, but this book is out of date to read about current Europe. He took this trip back in 1990. It's been 17 years and I would not use this book to accurately give a feel for each city visited.

I still more or less enjoyed the book and would read just to refresh myself on my own memories of Europe and to have a good chuckle.

I have now read two of Bryson's books. Both are not whole, but that is not what I was looking for. As a matter of fact I didn't know what I was looking for. That is why I really enjoyed this book. After a summer of traveling, in some cases to places in the book, I not only needed to get a good laugh, but read someone I could identify with. Wow. There is not a story exactly, but an attempt at a traveling stand up act where the comic is continually the butt of the joke. There are some pretty smart insights but also some rather petulant whining. I sympathized with too much of this! No, this will not be sold at gift shops in Bulgaria, or the Vatican but it is worth the escape.

I have lived in Europe for some years and have been to about half the places mentioned in this excuse for a travel book and they
are misrepresented throughout in a shamelessly self-absorbed fashion. The author clearly has NO concept of travel in any other terms than
getting on and off trains and in and out of nameless bars for beer. The book is so poorly written that it does not even bother to say what kind of beer, just as it tells us the "food is not very good" but not what the meal consisted of nor how it was prepared.
I would love to know which fool at the L.A. Times Book Review EVER deemed this book to be "...accurate-perfect telling detail." Not anyone
who had been outside of L.A. I would venture to guess.
As it is too few Americans are willing to travel outside the US for numerous reasons; the biggest being fear. Fear of flying,fear of the unknown,fear of foreigners that might speak a foreign language to them, something other than McFood on a menu. In short Americans are no longer as open-minded and curious as they used to be about other places and this book does us the great disservice of reinforcing all those non-reasons to sit at home watching "No Reservations" or other people paid to experience life as reality TV.

One of the funniest travel books I know. Bryson sets off solo, intent on recapturing the spirit of a long-ago college-era trek around Europe, covering the breadth of the "continent" in 21 brief chapters. His dry and droll observations on architecture, national character and local custom are so good I took to underlining them. Even if you aren't a travel book reader, try this, it is so damn funny, anyone should enjoy it.

My wife has been sorry about introducing me to Bill Bryson ever since the day she gave me "The Lost Continent". Since I am from Europe (Holland) and have travelled most part of Europe I can only fully agree with the writers descriptions of the countries he travelled (especially Belgium). Do not read this book in public places! People tend to react in various ways to a grown man laughing out loud all by himself.

Bryson has a charming, entertaining way of writing...and I enjoyed traveling with him through Europe via Neither Here nor There. At times I felt the negative impressions were a bit too heavy, but all in all, an engaging read.

If you want to read a captivating Bryson Title go for the Australian title, "In a Sunburned Country". I read that one first and then bought this one and the Appalachian Trail title, "A Walk in the Woods." I have to say I enjoyed the hiking book about his experiences hiking the Appalachian Trail only because he was so concerned about encountering bear. The other books haven't met the mark for me. READ "In a Sunburned Country" there is plenty of history and incredible accounts of what he sees and does in that book that are a lot of fun to read.

Bryon's humor had me bending over laughing, while trying to drive in Boston traffic. Any book that will make Boston traffic easier is a miracle. I loved being brought to every corner of Europe in this tape. I will get this book in paperbook to re-read the humor and be brought back to Europe again. I can only hope to meet Bryson's at the upcoming Maui Writer's Conference and have him laughing through the pages of my book.

An account of the author's rambles across Europe. Bryson is always entertaining, and his writing alternates from downright hilarious to the point of absurdity to dealing with some very sobering statistics. This is a wonderful mix and he's a very gifted writer whose works sound like a really great story you once heard from a friend.

I have enjoyed several of Bill Bryson's travel books, but did not like this one. The author was for the most part negative about the places he visited, apparently trying to find fault with things. His anti German bias seemed apparent. Ad there was very little humor in the whole thing.

I believe there are more than enough reviews here to decifer whether or not you plan to read this charming, witty and candid book. However, as an Australian raised in both Europe and America, I must heed a warning to those of you who read the negative reviews by Europeans and Asians. DO NOT LISTEN TO THEM!! They obviously lack a sense of humour and the ability to laugh at themselves (unlike Bryson). Bryson can be provincial at times, but he is so charming indeed! One who has traveled for days in a foreign land can understand his exhaustion and frustration and will howl with laughter.
Yes, Bryson at times can be brutally honest with his opinion of foreign countries and their inhabitants and culture, but they are HIS OPINIONS and they are frankly FUNNY and quite observant. I suppose those who take offense to his opinions neglected to understand that Bryson is a brazen self critic and will unabashedly admit to his lack of sophistication due to his stereotypical midwestern American upbringing. Please take no notice to the malevolence of the quazi-sensitive and humourless French and Germans who negatively reviewed this charming and engaging work.
Give the man a break and give this book a READ...Unless you possess absolutely no sense of humour, you will find it quite enjoyable!

Bryson is a good deal funnier and more mature than, say, Jeff Greenwald, but he falls into the trap of not meeting enough locals and padding his book with initially-amusing-but-eventually-repetitious accounts of surly service workers and mediocre hotels. He helpfully weaves tips on traveler's checks and museums into some of his anecdotes.

Bill Bryson has a great life. He gets to just set out galavanting through Europe at will, then scribble down his musings. But what musings they are. Reading this was an introduction to a different kind of travel writing. Most books set up a city, then give hotel and restaurant recommendations. Bryson never mentions any business by name. The book is more about his personal journey than being able to replicated it on your own trip to Europe. If only we could all have such carefree journeys as this.

"Neither here nor there"
by Bill Bryson
In the book "Neither here nor there" the American writer Bill Bryson tells about his adventures during his trips to Europe. The hole book is divided into twenty two chapters and every chapter tells the reader about a different place. In the first two chapters he describes his trip to the northernmost European town Hammerfest and in his typical sarcastic way he tells about the exhausting bus ride and the people he get to know. After an apparently endless journey by bus he finally arrives at Hammerfest. At first he is really bored in the small town as nothing ever seems to happen there, but after he have spent some weeks in the dark Hammerfest, he starts to enjoy the easy way of living there. He gets to know the advantage of having time for things you usually can't do. Furthermore, he starts making friends with the Mayor and some other inhabitants. So at the end of his stay in Hammerfest he doesn't only has got to know most of the people there, but even has seen Northern Lights, which had been the reason for that trip. After the fascinating event of the spectacular Northern Lights, that impressed him deeply, he decides to return to Oslo, although for a moment he has doubts if he should leave Hammerfest so quickly
He also remembers his first trip to Europe as a young man in the seventies, where he went by plane and got impressed by Europe and its people as it seemed to be so different from everything he had known before. He got to know the hospitality of a couple from Belgium and their Citroen 2CV as he hitch-hiked to find a room for the next few days. Although the wife didn't really trust him, the man was fascinated of him and wanted to spend more time with him, but Bryson himself thought that they had been very strange. So he was glad when he finally found a small hotel where he could stay. That summer he also tramped through Britain, Ireland, Scandinavia, Germany, Switzerland, Austria and Italy.

I bought this book for an aquaintance, a young guy with a good sense of humor and dreams of backpacking across europe, and couldn't resist reading it before passing it on. It really is hysterical, moving at a less tedious pace than some of his other travelogues. Bryson's ability to ridicule others (and himself!) and have it come off as endearing not an insult is remarkable, and the humor isn't forced, suprisingly poignant observations blend right in. The gift was quite a hit!

I was born and raised in Europe, but I grew up in America. I have since been back to travel thru Europe and Bill Bryson is right on target when he makes hilarious, witty, harsh, and yet exact comments about the way Europeans are.
All the criticism about Neither Here Nor There is coming from people without a sense of humor! Lighten up! If you are a traveler, you'll understand where he's coming from. He talks about the experiences that you think about, and will tell your friends and family after your return home, but his sense of humor and a cocky attitude make such a normal thing, like crossing the street in Paris, an event! This is a book that makes you laugh out-loud!
This is a great book for anyone who traveled thru Europe, or would like to go there. If you have never been to Europe, this book will give an idea of what traveling thru Europe really is like!