Down Under: Travels in a Sunburned Country

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Bryson's books seem so simple - solipsistic narrator, quick tour of country, lots of anecdotes, dash of humour, a few all-embracing conclusions - that some reviewers dismiss the skill with which they are put together.

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.

If he had bravely reversed his percentages, perhaps the public - surely not as idiotic as he suggests - might have been more likely to follow suit. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

The author also supplies plenty of humor in the form of historical accounts of early explorers and settlers of Australia.He reserves his funniest writing for those occasions when he encounters total frustration and annoyance. There is no shortage of idiots - which is why Down Under will sell thousands more copies than Anglo-Australian Attitudes.

In the United States and Canada it was published titled In a Sunburned Country, a title taken from the famous Australian poem, " My Country". Bryson's agreeable writing style , including his unique sense of humour , as with all his books, are an important and entertaining feature. 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.From its defiantly dreary title onwards, Down Under feels like a journey taken at too great a speed on a road well-worn by other, more intrepid travellers, not to mention millions of ordinary, non-writing tourists.

As a Brit, I found Down Under infinitely less threatening and much more enjoyable than Notes on a Small Island (see separate review); the latter which is nonetheless great itself. 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. The problem is that, after a few pages, one finds oneself looking forward to the moments when Bryson takes us back to the library.This part of the journey covers the Great Barrier Reef, the cities of Cairns, Darwin, and Alice Springs, and the mighty monolithic rock Uluru.