The Great McBurger States of America

By Peter Biddlecombe

To businessman and travel writer Peter Biddlecombe, the USA is about food. Huge, enormous, vitamin-fortified, artery-clogging, fat-laden, calorie-packed, colon-blocking, microwaveable mountains of the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0349116067
• ISBN13: 9780349116068
• Release Date: July 2002
• Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
• Length: 416 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.0" x 7.8"

Customer Reviews

Biddlecombe is Biddlecombe!

I wanted to write this review because I thought the other reviewers were slightly harsh in their marking and reviews and I want to set the record straight.If you are familiar with Biddlecombe style of writing and humour, you will not find any changes in his latest, this time a travel across America, to as many places and states as he could.I believe in these troubled and anxious times, people and Americans in particular, understandably so, are more sensitive about critisism and negative portrayal of their country. While Bill Bryson's classic Lost Continent had us in stitches, travelling across an America that we in Europe hardly knew, using humour tinged with sarcasm, maybe seeing his country in the renewed fresh eyes of someone who had lived in Europe for so long, Peter Biddlecombe as a European takes a more intellectual and historical view of America. While his critisism revolves mainly around rightful issues such as slavery, the fate of native Indians, the role of the English in the war of independence and underlines in the process a hypocrisy that many American undoubtedly are aware of and share,you can feel at the same time that he is also fascinated by the States, by the cultural diversity as well as geographical vastness. An American basher he is certainly not!Comedy and travel writers tend to look at any fault they see in a place they visit, or maybe a personal dislike to a place or someone and magnify it and overblow it for maximum effect, and Biddlecombe is no different, adding of course his special style of sarcasm, irony and self deprecation.If you enjoyed Biddlecombe earlier books, there is no reason why you should not enjoy this one too. You can agree with some of his views, or disagree with all of them, and this is not the point. It is to travel with him to places you will probably never set foot in, and laugh at what is essentially a funny and harmless travel book.