Title: Bill Bryson's African Diary
Author: Bill Bryson
Publisher: Broadway
Year: 2002
64 pages
Sadly, this begs the question, "So what?" Michael Dorris, faced with the same offer/task, did a beautiful job in Rooms in the House of Stone: The "Thistle" Series of Essays, which managed to be small, brief, but filled with useful observations and understated but sincere sentiment. Bryson's account comes off more like notes about a little junket. It gives very little sense of Africa, perhaps because it tells rather than shows. As other reviewers have noted, the humor seems insulting at times. Poor Bill has to fly in a small plane. How about the people who don't even get to walk because they're in refugee camps? He could have gotten away with this if there was more to connect the reader to the Africans he interacts with, but there's little of that, and not that much about what CARE does, either. It reminds me of de Botton's A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary, another sponsored gig that is info-light and seems constrained by the necessity of praising one's benefactor.
No comments:
Post a Comment