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

Product Information

Then in 1995 Aum Shinrikyo gained sudden notoriety when it released extravagant quantities of the nerve gas sarin into the Tokyo subway system, killing twelve people. This is a country that loses a prime minister and that is so vast and empty that a band of amateur enthusiasts could conceivably set off the world's first nongovernmental atomic bomb on its mainland and almost four years would pass before anyone noticed. He has written books on language, on Shakespeare, on history, and on his own childhood in the hilarious memoir The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid . However, when Bryson switches his attention to our Antipodean cousins, all of that angst immediately dissipates, and you can sit back and enjoy his particular talent for finding nuanced little stories in among the detritus of life and bringing them to life with his sparkling and witty prose.

Its sports are of little interest to us and the last television series it made that we watched with avidity was Skippy. The rest of this section is devoted to the author's account of what he considers to be Civilized Australia, with accounts of Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Canberra, the Gold Coast, Surfers Paradise, and many countryside towns in between. Must have ate some of his own cooking" and a full tuckerbag more, are entertainingly, albeit rather hastily, delivered by the reader.

He reserves his funniest writing for those occasions when he encounters total frustration and annoyance. When I later checked this hotel out, I discovered that several travellers had indeed given it a very low star rating with a mixture of scornful comments. In A Sunburned Country is his report on what he found in an entirely different place: Australia, the country that doubles as a continent, and a place with the friendliest inhabitants, the hottest, driest weather, and the most peculiar and lethal wildlife to be found on the planet. is top of the hardback bestsellers list; it has just been read on Radio 4; the man can clearly do no wrong. Bill Bryson ’s bestselling travel books include The Lost Continent and Notes from a Small Island , which in a national poll was voted the book that best represents Britain.

I am glad of the opportunity for reading this book because I learned so much about a Country and its people for which and for whom I have a great affection and previously had little knowledge.He arrives at his destination, finds a hotel, meanders around the neighbourhood, has a couple of drinks, eavesdrops on a conversation or two, then goes to bed. Events, how people look and what they say are recorded faithfully and with master of observation Bill Bryson's wonderful facility for making you laugh out loud, there are plenty of reasons for doing so. Also, his insatiable thirst for detail finds him, as ever, ferreting out the who, the why and the where to enhance the reader's knowledge of the book's subject matter. nº 2:: England's lake district: beauty besieged; Lions of darkness; Students with a mission: NASA puts the can do project in orbit; Pollution in the former U. The thing that Bryson most loves about Australia - its "effortlessly dry, direct way of viewing the world" - is, in fact, his own.

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. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.

I felt, when reading this book that here we have an author who's churning out one book after another, thinking he's found a winning formula when really it all gets a bit same-o. Bill Bryson’s assessment of her, the hotel, and the people of Darwin would not look good on Trip Adviser. Because he did not spend long in Australia, occasionally the material in Down Under is so thin that even Bryson can't raise a good joke, and is obliged to wheel out Jurassic specimens ("a place where men were men and sheep were nervous"). I think my favourite episode in the whole book is when Bill and his increasingly tetchy companion drive around Darwin several times trying to find a hotel whose name is unaccountably different from the name it went by when he booked it. Now living in the UK, Bill Bryson made his name with his iconic, insightful and very, very funny books of travel writing including: The Lost Continent, Neither Here Nor There, Notes from a Small Island (voted the book that best represents Britain in a national poll) A Walk in the Woods and The Road to Little Dribbling: More Notes from a Small Island.