Bryson's remark that the English language didn't adopted many German words is not correct. Especially the U.S.-English is quit spiced with words from “Deutsch”, not only Kindergarten and Lager (beer), there is also SPITZER and SPRITZER (any many more).
for more and picture go to :::
http://www.bookcrossing.com/journal/5945637
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Read review from http://september.gaia.com - I may say exactly the same for Bryson's GERMAN “references” as September wrote about Japanese.

Dear Mr. Bryson,
If you would like to publish a list of interesting facts, please publish a list of interesting facts. Don't give people headaches by trying to force it all into prose and passing it off as a pseudo-scholarly work.

Seriously, this book is trivia upon trivia upon trivia ad infinitum. If you took all the pointless junk out, this book would be about 80% smaller and several times more coherent.

As a speaker of Japanese (JLPT L1) I would like to add that the facts about Japanese found in this book are never false, but they are consistently misleading. I advise all readers to double-check what they read here with native speakers before accepting any of his foreign language facts.

But you know what, actually, I would advise people to just not read this book in the first place.