In a Sunburned Country

Rating:
Summary: The Dirt On Down Under
Review: As Bill Bryson notes in his excellent In A Sunburned Country, Australia is a vast, mysterious place to most of the world. Even native Australians are unaware of many of the treasures in their country. Mr. Bryson takes us on a magical journey through the land down under, moving between major cities like Sydney & Melbourne to remote Outback posts like Alice Springs. Through it all he relays interesting stories about the country including its origins as a penal colony, its government, the incredible assortment of deadly creatures that live there, the men who first explored the dangerous Outback and other great stories too numerous to list. We also get Mr. Bryson's personal anecdotes and stories of his trip that are always humorous and many times insightful. Being that it takes 26 hours by plane to reach Australia, most of us probably won't get the chance to visit the country or if we ever do, we won't have the time to explore its vastness. In lieu of personally seeing it all, Bill Bryson vividly brings the country to us through this first rate book.

Rating:
Summary: A Superb CD Book Listening Experience
Review: I love to hear Bill Bryson read his books aloud. His 10 disc monologue on Australia was, by turns, fascinating, LOL amusing, astonishing, informative, good natured and good company. I won't describe the book's content here - others have done a fine job in their reviews. My focus is, instead, on the experience of LISTENING to Bill Bryson. I regularly listen to books on CD as I drive around Upstate New York for work. After spending many hundreds of hours hearing recordings of books, I fancy myself an experienced and discriminating listener. IMHO, Bryson is an engaging and sociable reader as well as a superb (virtual) travelling companion. I believe he genuinely enjoys the act of reading aloud for others. After hearing this generous yet informal treatment, I am reluctant to read the print verion. I fear that the inevitable change in my experience of Bryson's Voice, caused by experiencing him visually instead of with my ears, would strike me as a loss. Listening to the CD version of In a Sunburned Country, it was my happy experience to feel that Bryson was sharing his stories of Australia directly with me.

Rating:
Summary: Bryson's walk in "the bush."
Review: Soonafter documenting his ambitious attempt to hike the Appalachian Trail in A WALK IN THE WOODS, bestselling author Bill Bryson (NOTES FROM A SMALL ISLAND, A SHORT HISTORY OF NEARLY EVERYTHING) packed his bags and set off for the Australian outback and its three million square miles of baking emptiness (p. 8). "Let me just say," he writes, "I love Australia--adore it immeasurably--and am smitten anew each time I see it" (p. 10). Along the way, Bryson discovers that the people are "immensely likable--cheerful, extrovert, quick-witted, and unfailingly obliging." Their cities are safe and clean. The food is excellent, the beer is cold, there is coffee on every corner, and the sun nearly always shines. "Life doesn't get much better than this," he observes (p. 10). While reveling his way through "the bush" into "the outback," Bryson also discovers that the land down under is also the most dangerous place on earth, inhabited by some of the world's deadliest critters: toxic caterpillars, funnel web spiders, aggressive seashells, chomping sharks and crocodiles, poisonous snakes, and the deadly box jellyfish, just to name a few (p. 6). Nevertheless enchanted by it all, for Bryson, "this is wonderful. This is exhilarating. This is why I love to come to Australia" (p. 10).

In A SUNBURNED COUNTRY, Bryson once again proves to be an entertaining travel guide. Full of his characteristic wit, humor, amusing trivia and wacky anecdotes, the point of this book is that Australia is a truly interesting place (p. 304), a land where prime ministers disappear into the surf and bombs explode in the desert unnoticed, a land "packed with stuff. Interesting stuff, ancient stuff, stuff not readily explained. Stuff yet to be found." "Trust me," Bryson observes, "this is an interesting place" (p. 9).

G. Merritt