Book Review: “A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail”

This book in four words: Quick read. Entertaining. Thoughtful.

The thoughtfulness is what surprised me.

I wouldn’t be rich if I had a dollar for each time someone told me I should read this book after finding out I’m planning to hike the Appalachian Trail, but I’d have a tidy ten dollars to buy a few ice cream cones.

Whaddya know? I SHOULD read this book. And I’m glad I did! Here’s why: 

Bill Bryson’s bottomless well of dead-pan humor and neatly delivered snark characterizes the story of two, occasionally hapless, middle-aged men on a long-distance hike. You need to keep reading to really catch it. His reference to bear-attack books that made me smile in the first pages came back half way through the book to make me literally laugh out loud. Oh, you’ll see why.

His conversations on the changing environment in and around the A.T. popped up so suddenly in the midst of afternoon rambles that it often took a paragraph for me to realize he was discussing a serious problem. He treats sad realities with grace and humor but doesn’t lose sight of how troubling they are, or of the beauty that remains. They were moving environmental essays that only sometimes seemed awkwardly plopped in the middle of a different story.

Those environmental bits have stuck with me since I finished the book. That's where you have the unexpected thoughtfulness.

I’m sure when I’m hiking in a few months I’ll think of his stories of damp nights in rodent-overrun shelters and smile (or grimace). But I’ll be thinking more of hundreds of acres of forest lost in Great 

Smoky Mountain National Park, and hundreds of species of now extinct northern songbirds. 

Thank you, Mr. Bryson for finding a humorous, and only slightly judgmental, way of opening oureyes to the beauty of Appalachia and the importance of keeping it that way.