Made in America - Bill Bryson

Bill Bryson writes about the informal history of American English in this 500 page book. Like all his books he researches a lot (authentically, unlike Dave Barry who just makes it all up and does not try to educate) and finds the funniest things in the truth. In his travel books its easy to find funnier characters and pieces of history but when you are looking at the work as a history of informal English you tend to get slightly academic - you can't miss out a word or two see.

Much of what I learned as history from this book is interesting reading. It is also stuff I found amusing but then its not eminently worth remembering. Just to look at the sheer amount of stuff Bill covers these are the topics - the Mayflower (ship that carried people over to America I think), how they became to be called Americans (by some mistake named after a less known chap called Amerigo or something thanks to a misinformed writer), becoming a nation, the revolution (languages, how some Indians knew English even then), the age of inventions(Edison and the bunch, patents, electrical appliances), taming the West (the myths about cowboys), the Melting Pot of immigrants (Italian, Irish, English, German so on), travel in America, eating in America (lousy manners, knives, forks), shopping in America (super markets, convenience stores, Selfridges), domestic matters, advertising (scary ads, inaccurate ads, unethical ads), movies (how one chap who wanted to find if all four legs of the horse go off the ground led to the movies), sport and play (how American football claimed so many lives, how baseball came in, war, sex (how they were  a sexually liberated bunch before becoming super conservative), Kitty Hawk (good info about the Wright Brothers), Space Age etc.

That's a lot. The chapter which I will read again because it made me laugh out loud is the one on advertising. Bill makes a case for the kind of advertisements that went on scaring people about how their stomachs would fall in if they did not use a particular product, how Eastman named Kodak out of a whim (just that it was easy to remember), how they advertised a brand of toilet paper because it would lead to lesser rectal problems. Anyway it made me laugh out loud.