Down Under: Travels in a Sunburned Country

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He reserves his funniest writing for those occasions when he encounters total frustration and annoyance.

This book shows its roots - in a colour supplement commissioned by The Mail On Sunday, padded out with some A-level history and lots of twee observations of a country crossed at speed. Bryson is very definitely upper middle class but it is that ability to be Everyman; see what we all see and yet articulate it in a way we cannot; that makes his writing so successful. 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. 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. While Bryson is on your home patch, there is always that anxiety that he is going to trash some icon or way of life that you hold dear.

Ignoring such dangers and yet curiously obsessed by them Bill Bryson journeyed to Australia and promptly fell in love with the country. we meet many of the strange and unique animals, fish, and plants that have developed that haven't changed since even before the dinosaurs. We are experiencing delays with deliveries to many countries, but in most cases local services have now resumed. The people are cheerful, extrovert, quick-witted and unfailingly obliging: their cities are safe and clean and nearly always built on water; the food is excellent; the beer is cold and the sun nearly always shines. These are interspersed with occasional excursions into the history, geography, politics or scientific facts and curiosities about particular places.

The laugh out loud passages on his introduction to cricket I applaud, the game makes as much sense to me as it did to Bill. From ancient fossils on the West coast that can be found there living in small colonies, to the gold rush of 1849, the same time frame as the ones in the USA and Canada. From the Northeast you will travel across the far north and discover the dangers and weather that can stop you in your tracks. What I enjoy most is the feeling he gives the reader of moving in close to a subject, examining its quirkiest or most singular aspect, then panning out again to take a more distant or panoramic view. He reviewed the new Bryson alongside another book about Australia, Michael Davie's Anglo-Australian Attitudes.The people are cheerful, extroverted, quick-witted and unfailingly obliging: their cities are safe and clean and nearly always built on water; the food is excellent; the beer is cold and the sun nearly always shines. His new book The Body: A Guide for Occupants was shortlisted for the Royal Society Science Book Prize and is an international bestseller. It was also published as part of Walk About, which included Down Under and another of Bryson's books, A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail, in one volume. The Lost Continent (1989) was a rite of passage: when his father died it prompted him to discover the continent lost with his youth.