74 pages • 2 hours read
Bill BrysonA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
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Bryson briefly discusses some of the most famous people who have successfully completed the end-to-end AT trek, including Earl V. Shaffer, who in 1948 became the first to accomplish it; Ward Leonard, who completed the trail in 60 days in the 1980s; and Bill Irwin, a man with blindness, who completed it with a service dog. Then, Bryson returns to the narrative and rationalizes his and Katz’s decision to skip a portion of the AT by noting that they’d already walked half a million steps and that “it didn’t seem altogether essential to do the other 4.5 million to get the idea of the thing” (163). During their cab ride from Gatlinburg to Knoxville and rental car journey to Virginia, they experience the mind-numbing transition from being in a forest for so long to being back in the crass urban world.
Bryson discusses botanical history at length, noting how botanists from Europe plunged deep into the forests of North America to discover and cultivate new plants. He notes that aside from Indigenous Americans, the first people to venture deep into the woods “weren’t looking for prehistoric creatures or passages to the West or new lands to settle.
By Bill Bryson
A Short History of Nearly Everything
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Bill Bryson
In a Sunburned Country
In a Sunburned Country
Bill Bryson
Notes From A Small Island
Notes From A Small Island
Bill Bryson
One Summer: America, 1927
One Summer: America, 1927
Bill Bryson
The Body: A Guide for Occupants
The Body: A Guide for Occupants
Bill Bryson
The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid
The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid
Bill Bryson
The Lost Continent
The Lost Continent
Bill Bryson
The Mother Tongue
The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way
Bill Bryson
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