How Does Bill Bryson Use Humour to Entertain His Reader?

Everyone dreams of living a happy and fulfilling life. Sometimes, we need a fresh start. In “Mammita’s Garden Cove,” Max daydreamed about a life where he could start over in Canada. He thought hard about his life in this new place. However, the situation didn’t unfold like he wanted. Cyril Dabydeen uses literary techniques such as diction, imagery, and irony to express Max’s intricate attitude towards his new home in Canada, and his old home on the island.

Where are we going this time? Who are we going to meet? What are we going to learn? These are all the questions one has in mind when opening up the spine of a book. It is not always just the knowledge that one is yearning for, but the adventure, and the people one gets to meet along the way. How an author brings everyone along with them to the destination of their choice is by using techniques in writing like regionalism and local color. Regionalism and local color is setting the reader in a particular place (i.e. England, North American, Australia), the characters met, and the languages they speak. In “Sense of Place: A Response to Regionalism,” written by Jonathan Hart, “from the beginning, North America was multinational and multicultural” (Hart 113). Kate Chopin uses all available sources

Nowadays the wide array of transportation means and infrastructures at our disposal has made it relatively easy for us to travel from one country to another; even when those countries are thousands of miles away from each other. However, during the 13th and 14th centuries, travelling was not that easy. Yet, two men, the Italian tradesman Marco Polo and the Moroccan Jurist Ibn Battuta became famous for having managed to perform extremely long distance journeys away from their home country. At the end of their long travels, both men shared their experiences with the world via the books, The Travels of Marco Polo and The Travels of Ibn Battuta. An analysis of those two texts reveals two things. On one hand, Marco Polo remained a cultural

Gentle waves, lush greenery, and sun-soaked beaches, Antigua embodies your ideal holiday destination. But Jamaica Kincaid turns your paradise upside down in her new memoir A Small Place. Using her pen as a sword, Kincaid slashes Antigua’s façade of perfection into shreds and presses the blade against the throats of tourism, colonialism and corruption.

“If the police showed up she would have to drop me and pretend I wasn’t hers, like I was a bag of weed”(28). Humor like this in Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime, produces easier to absorb content since his memoir is full with hard to swallow concepts. The story he shares follows him, a half black and half white child, growing up in South Africa during apartheid. For this reason Trevor was quite literally born a crime. He writes about the struggles he had to face growing up with his mother side of the family, the black side. Although the odds were against him the day he was born, he is able to accomplish many things thanks to the help from his mother who would literally take a bullet for her children. Although many writers use dark humor to tell

A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid presents the hypothetical story of a tourist visiting Antigua, the author’s hometown. Kincaid places the reader in the shoes of the tourist, and tells the tourist what he/she would see through his/her travels on the island. She paints a picturesque scene of the tourist’s view of Antigua, but stains the image with details of issues that most tourists overlook: the bad roads, the origin of the so-called native food, the inefficiency of the plumbing systems in resorts, and the glitches in the health care system. Kincaid was an established writer for The New Yorker when she wrote this book, and it can be safely assumed that majority of her readers had, at some point in their lives, been tourists. I have been a

Daily, hundreds of thousands of people are traveling, whether it’s by plane, car, bus, boat, or foot, people are traveling to new locations and being immersed in different cultures. Many fail to realize how ignorant of a tourist they are. Kincaid explains that tourists are morally “ugly” and use other, less fortunate people, for their own amusement. She tries to enlighten those who are privileged to be more considerate when they are visiting new places. Published author Jamaica Kincaid wrote “The Ugly Tourist,” originally written in her book, A Small Place, where she tries to convince readers that tourists are, “a piece of rubbish” (207). Kincaid’s attempt to convey to the audience that tourists are ignorant and morally “ugly” is partially successful, due to her satisfactory emotional appeal, yet inability to produce a less angry tone, along with minimal logical appeal.

Us and Them by David Sedaris shows a powerful and thoughtful story that brings out humor. It makes us not only examine the history but themselves in there lives. The author points out the importance in family and how technology takes over family bounding time. The tomkey are described as a family who didn't watch television which seemed bizarre to him. Its also Ironic since the Tomkeys didn't believe in television but there lives seem to be a show to the author. The author has grow up with television so thats why he was amazed that the Tomkeys family would sit for dinner and have long conversations. It was a uncommon bonding for the author. Due to the lack of communication that is caused by his mother and son they cant create friendship with

It was very impactful being put in the tourist seat while reading this novel. In the beginning of the story as the tourist i am being exposed to all this negativity which i came here in the first place to avoid. Kincaid tells us that everyone has new cars here because it is really easy to get loans from the bank. This left

There are the tourists—those who seek temporary relaxation, or famous sights. There are the travelers—those who wander, without aim, for the love of moving. There are the explorers—those seeking adventure, the thrill of unearthing things rarely seen.

Billy Collins has compiled twelve poetry compilations; made a six figure pay advance, just from changing publishers; served as poet laureate for two terms, which most only serve one term; served as New York’s poet laureate right after his two terms of the United States poet laureate; in total has sold over 200,000 poems since his debut book Pokerface in 1977; named “the most popular poet” by The New York Times. Billy Collins’ fame is almost incomparable to other poets. His poems are are the “not-so-serious” side of the spectrum. Billy Collins’ poetry is known for its dry humor, too. Although his writing is rather plain and is known for being quite humdrum, Billy Collins is the most skilled poet of his time because his poetry is uniquely characterized by his unique dry sense of humor.

The author's description of the island allows for me, the reader, to take a short step away from the island with a bunch of children trapped on it and enjoy what seems to be representing a perfect utopia.

What makes traveling to foreign lands such a coveted and memorable experience? What does one get out of exploring new cultures and atmospheres? In “The Shock of Teapots,” by Cynthia Ozick, the quality and nature of traveling and travelers themselves is explored. Within this work of creative nonfiction, Ozick strategically uses genre, diction, and exemplification to effectively emphasize that travelers see ordinary things in a new light when visiting other places and countries.

From the start of “A Small Place,” the author establishes an unsettling position for the reader by using second person perspective to give the audience a personal experience, “The thing you have always suspected about yourself the minute you become a tourist is true: A tourist is an ugly human being” (Kincaid, 14). The act of being the tourist in respect to Kincaid's statement is being unaware of the surroundings and people who reside in this country you refer to as a paradise. She pushes the audience out of their comfort zone to an unsettling acknowledgment of ignorance - if you have traveled and expressed these behaviors. The author presents the idea that the act of traveling with the mindset that indigenous people are benefiting is a form of self-justification rather than reality. Kincaid acknowledges the audience’s ignorance of the situation as an institutional one that educated you to have this mindset. She describes this situation the people of Antigua endured, as something you were not taught, which exonerates your oblivious demeanor toward your surroundings,

I have often had a fancy for writing a romance about an English yachtsman who slightly miscalculated his course and discovered England under the impression that it was a new island in the South Seas… What could be more delightful than to