Down Under: Travels in a Sunburned Country (Bryson Book 6)

Product Information

Must have ate some of his own cooking" and a full tuckerbag more, are entertainingly, albeit rather hastily, delivered by the reader.

From its defiantly dreary title onwards, Down Under feels like a journey taken at too great a speed on a road well-worn by other, more intrepid travellers, not to mention millions of ordinary, non-writing tourists. In January of that year, according to a report written in America by a Times reporter, scientists were seriously investigating the possibility that a mysterious seismic disturbance in the remote Australian outback almost four years earlier had been a nuclear explosion set off by members of the Japanese doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo. He reserves his funniest writing for those occasions when he encounters total frustration and annoyance. His best-known works include Notes from a Small Island, Neither Here Nor There and A Short History of Nearly Everything.Just in time for the 2000 Olympics-the bestselling quthor of A Walk in the Woods takes listeners on a truly outrageous tour Down Under.

Just before I set off on this trip I went to my local library in New Hampshire and looked Australia up in the New York Times Index to see how much it had engaged our attention in recent years. Taking listeners on a rollicking ride far beyond packaged-tour routes, IN A SUNBURNED COUNTRY introduces a place where interesting things happen all the time. Its population, just over 18 million, is small by world standards--China grows by a larger amount each year--and its place in the world economy is consequently peripheral; as an economic entity, it ranks about level with Illinois. Bill Bryson describes his travels by railway and car throughout Australia, his conversations with people in all walks of life about the history, geography, unusual plants and animals of the country, and his wry impressions of the life, culture and amenities (or lack thereof) in each locality.The world those first Englishmen found was famously inverted-- its seasons back to front, its constellations upside down--and unlike anything any of them had seen before even in the near latitudes of the Pacific. Five of its creatures--the funnel web spider, box jellyfish, blue-ringed octopus, paralysis tick, and stonefish--are the most lethal of their type in the world.