Bookraft

Full Disclosure - do you want to embarrass yourself by laughing out loud outrageously in the subway or say on the redeye to Chicago's O'Hare? Then you might think twice about picking up Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods. Or if you are a member of the US Forest Service and you have been trying to spruce up the Bush Administration's eco-record = > adopt the Defense Department's policy - don't ask, don't tell, and certainly don't recommend this book to anybody inside or outside the Washington Beltline. All others, especially those with funny bones intact, read on.

Full Disclosure II - I have hiked significant chunks of the Appalachain Trail in New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Virginia. So I know first hand of what Bill speaks. But you don't need that background to appreciate Bill's rationalizing why he had to hike the AT-Appalachain Trails with such opening nuggets as: "When guys in camouflage pants and hunting hats sat around in the Four Aces Diner talking about fearsome things done out-of-doors, I would no longer have to feel like a cupcake. I would want some of that swagger that comes with being able to gaze at the far horizon with eyes of chipped granite, and say with a slow, manly sniff: ' Yeah, I have shit in the woods'"

And a little bit farther down the trail, while taking a pitstop at a restaurant in Hiawassee, Georgia one overhears - "Dessert was the highlight. Everyone on the trail dreams of something, usually sweet and gooey, and my sustaining vision had been an out-sized slab of pie. It had occupied my thoughts for days. And when the waitress came to take our order, I asked her with beseeching eyes and a hand on her forearm, to bring me the largest piece she could slice without losing her job. She brought me a vast, viscous, canary yellow edge of lemon pie. It was a monument to food technology. Yellow enough to give you a headache, sweet enough to make your eyes roll up into your head - everything, in short, you could want in a pie so long as taste and quality didn't enter into your requirements" Interestingly as Bryce and Katz roll down the trail, the self deprecating early humour thins away just as the excess fat and weight is trimmed away; while the satire becomes more pointed, and saucy - especially about the National Park and Forest Services.

Full Disclosure III: If Bill Bryson runs for national political office, he should keep his campaign swings to the deep South to a minimum. Perhaps not at all. It might have been the forlorn Spring Bill and Stephen had to hike through in Georgia and the Carolinas; but for Bill, though understanding at times, is as relentless as a Great Smokies Spring snowstorm about what communities and people in the deep South have left themselves in for. So be aware, as the book matures so does the voice and it can be crackling dark.

Finally, consider the book as much history and accounting of the geology, botany and biology of all things Appalachain, with due diligence and credit given to every section (yes, even the deep South) with a thoroughness that would do an Audobon proud. So come for the humor, but be aware it changes like the weather on the White Mountain's Mount Washington - and can be as biting. But also come for the completeness of the record, for telling us facts about this Eastern eco-spinal chord that is the Appalachain Trail which stretches from Maine to Georgia in a way that is like the US - almost accidentally wonderous.