Australia

ISBN: 0-7679-0386-2
__In a Sunburned Country__ is a marvelous travel book about the many wonders and mysteries of Australia. The book starts out with Bill Bryson flying to Australia and realizing that it is truly situated at the other end of the globe. Immediately, he is struck by the intense heat that inhabits the deserts of Australia. He tries to find a cozy hotel that has ice-cold air conditioning, but as he soon realizes, most hotels in Australia don’t have air conditioning at all. As his journey continues, he travels to the Great Outback. He takes a train from the coastal regions of Western Australia into the vast, unexplored central outback. As the landscape changed, the attitudes and morality of the people change. It was as if he had stepped into another dimension. All he could see all around him was dirt and rubble with an occasional half dried out bush in the distance. When he finally made it to his destination, which was a very little town in the middle of no where, he decided to walk and have a look around. As he mentions in the book, “ It was like stepping back in time to the early 1900’s, there where no TV’s or cell phones, and in some places even no electricity”. This theme of being stuck back in time prevails all throughout the book, as he travels from the west, to the Outback, and eventually to the east coast.

This book is definitely not recommended for children under the age of 13. I would not recommend it because of explicit scenes and mature content that children would not be able to understand, and the meaning they have to the book. I would instead recommend this book to teens and adults who love to travel, have been to Australia, or are planning to go to Australia. It captures the culture and mood that Australia would have on a tourist, and some possible destinations to see while you where there. In addition, I would recommend this book to teens who are interested in reading about new cultures and different worlds because Australia’s people and the landscape of Australia is completely different then how people are used to living in the United States.

__In a Sunburned Country__ is not an extremely hard read, but in my opinion a very slow moving book, with almost no plot to it at all. It is a travel book but it would have been a lot more exiting if it had some kind of plot to it. For about the first 50 pages, the book is all about his ride on this amazing train ride that took him from the costal regions all the way to the center of Australia. To me it was as if this would never end and that this book would just continue like this. In addition, after almost every chapter there is a chapter about the history of Australia and how it was founded and by whom. It is really interesting at first but after a while it is hard to keep the two stories apart and a reader just wants to put the book down. For someone who is really interested in history and the forming of nations, this is a great read. But If you like reading books in which there is a strong plot that flows throughout the whole book, and is action packed, or based on drama, this is definitely the wrong book for you. Sebastian R.