I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to. And, as soon as Bill Bryson was old enough, he left. Des Moines couldn´t hold him, but it did lure him back. After ten years in England he returned to the land of his youth, and drove almost 14,000 miles in search of a mythical town called Amalgam, the kind of smiling village where the films of his youth were set. Instead he drove through a series of horrific burgs which he renamed Smellville, Fartville, Coleslaw, Dead Squaw, Coma, Doldrum. At best his search led him to Anywhere, USA; a lookalike strip of gas stations, motels and hamburger outlets populated by obese and slow-witted hicks with a partiality for synthetic fibres. He found a continent that was doubly lost;lost to itself because blighted by greed, pollution, mobile homes and television; lost to him because he had become a foreigner in his own country.