To Bryson, Welsh is 'as unpronounceable as it looks', and Welsh pronunciations 'rarely bear much relation to their spellings.' He then spouts off with a series of jokes that are so ethnocentric and condescending that, if you took them at face value, you couldn't help but feel sorry for the poor backward speakers of silly old Welsh. The example that really set me off was his treatment of the Welsh language. My problem with this book is that it gets so much right, and so much wrong. But boy, did I find this book infuriating.

I'm what you might call a big fan of language.

Studied a few foreign languages, took a linguistics class or two in college. I know exactly a little bit about English, and a little bit less about linguistics in general. October 8 sees the publication of A Really Short History of Nearly Everything. His next book, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, is a memoir of growing up in 1950s America, featuring another appearance from his old friend Stephen Katz. It was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize, before going on to win the Aventis Prize for Science Books and the Descartes Science Communication Prize. A Short History of Nearly Everything was lauded with critical acclaim, and became a huge bestseller. In his last book, he turned his attention to science. Other travel books include the massive bestseller Notes From a Small Island, which won the 2003 World Book Day National Poll to find the book which best represented modern England, followed by A Walk in the Woods (in which Stephen Katz, his travel companion from Neither Here Nor There, made a welcome reappearance), Notes From a Big Country and Down Under.īill Bryson has also written several highly praised books on the English language, including Mother Tongue and Made in America. It was followed by Neither Here Nor There, an account of his first trip around Europe. In The Lost Continent, Bill Bryson's hilarious first travel book, he chronicled a trip in his mother's Chevy around small town America. He and his family then moved to New Hampshire in America for a few years, but they have now returned to live in the UK. He lived for many years with his English wife and four children in North Yorkshire. He settled in England in 1977, and worked in journalism until he became a full time writer. William McGuire 'Bill' Bryson, OBE, FRS was born in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1951.

The mother tongue bryson