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

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Points well made, but just when you thought all was lost she produced a generous conclusion that helps to explain why Bryson gets away with his speed and shapelessness: "Bryson is such an agreeable, warm-hearted and witty companion that I ended up enjoying this book despite its shortcomings.

If you are not stung or pronged to death in some unexpected manner, you may be fatally chomped by sharks or crocodiles, or carried helplessly out to sea by irresistible currents, or left to stagger to an unhappy death in the baking outback.So many of the oldest objects ever found on earth-- the most ancient rocks and fossils, the earliest animal tracks and riverbeds, the first faint signs of life itself--have come from Australia. Bryson goes to Australia for a couple of months, produces a hack work that sells massively and even wins over a perceptive reviewer who has immediately seen through its slackness and superficiality. Consider just one of those stories that did make it into the Times in 1997, though buried away in the odd-sock drawer of Section C.

In that year across the full range of possible interests--politics, sports, travel, the coming Olympics in Sydney, food and wine, the arts, obituaries, and so on--the Times ran 20 articles that were predominantly on or about Australian affairs. 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. 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. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

This seemed doubly astounding to me--first that Australia could just lose a prime minister (I mean, come on) and second that news of this had never reached me.

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.

The thing that Bryson most loves about Australia - its "effortlessly dry, direct way of viewing the world" - is, in fact, his own. 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. je relirai ce livre avec plaisir et intérêt, j'ai découvert que l'auteur est assez prolixe pour d'autres voyage-reportages !