In a Sunburned Country - Softcover

Bryson, Bill

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0385259417 ISBN 13: 9780385259415

Publisher: Anchor Canada, 2001

Synopsis

Deliciously funny, fact-filled and adventurous, In a Sunburned Country takes us on a grand tour of Australia. It's a place where interesting things happen all the time, from a Prime Minister lost — yes, lost — while swimming at sea, to Japanese cult members who may (entirely unnoticed) have set off an atomic bomb on their 500,000 acre property in the great western desert.

Australia is the only island that is also a continent, and the only continent that is also a country. Its aboriginal people, a remote and mysterious race with a tragic history, have made it their home for millennia. And despite the fact that it is the most desiccated, infertile and climatically aggressive of all inhabited continents, it teems with life. In fact, Australia has more things that can kill you in extremely nasty ways than anywhere else: sharks, crocodiles, the planet's ten most deadly poisonous snakes, fluffy yet toxic caterpillars, sea shells that actually attack you, and the unbelievable box jellyfish (don't ask). The dangerous riptides of the sea and the sun-baked wastes of the outback both lie in wait for the unwary.

Australia is an immense and fortunate land, and it has found in Bill Bryson its perfect guide. In a Sunburned Country offers the best of all possible introductions to what may well be the best of all possible nations. Even with those jellyfish.

About this title

Review:

As his many British fans already know, bearded Yankee butterball Bill Bryson specialises in going to countries we think we know well, only to return with travelogues that are surprisingly cynical and yet shockingly affectionate. It's a unique style, possibly best suited to the world's weirder destinations. It's helpful here: Bryson's latest subject is that oddest of continents, Australia.

For a start, there's the oddly nasty fauna and flora. Barely a page of Down Under is without its lovingly detailed list of lethal antipodean critters: sociopathic jellyfish, homicidal crocs, toilet-dwelling death-spiders, murderous shrubs (yes, shrubs). Bryson's absorbing and informative portrait is of a terrain so intractably vast, a land so climatically extreme, it seems expressly designed to daunt and torment humankind.

This very user-unfriendliness throws up another Aussie paradox. If the country is so hostile how come the natives are so laid back, so relaxed? As Bryson shuffles from state to state, he seeks the key to the uniquely cool Australian character and finds it in Australia's tragicomic past, her genetic seeding of convicts, explorers, gold diggers, outlaws. This is a country of lads and mates, of boozy gamblers--nowadays mellowed by sunshine and sporting success.

Down Under is a fine book. So it may not be quite as deliciously malicious as Bryson's The Lost Continent, nor as laugh-out-loud funny as Neither Here Nor There. But so what? A Bill Bryson on cruise control is better than most travel writers on turbodrive. --Sean Thomas

Review:

"Bryson makes you laugh out loud...Down Under is filled with quirky stories'," (Sunday Express)

"The thing that Bryson most loves about Australia - its "effortlessly dry, direct way of viewing the world" - is, in fact, his own. They're a perfect fit" (The New York Times Book Review)

"Bryson is the perfect travelling companion... when it comes to travel's peculiars the man still has no peers" (The Times)

"Bill Bryson is a very talented writer and an enormously funny and perceptive one. He is an artist who needs a big canvas. Australia has provided this. He's painted a masterpiece in travel literature" (Globe & Mail Toronto)

About this edition

• Publisher: Anchor Canada
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0385259417
• ISBN 13: 9780385259415
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 376