Skip to main content

Book Review: In A Sunburned Country by Bill Brysoon

By
**** Recommend it
Highly recommend if you are a Bill Bryson fan.
Highly recommend if you are considering a trip to Australia.
Recommend if you are interested in Australia. 

I have read a number of Bryson books over the years. My wife and I started many years ago by jointly reading "A Walk in the Woods." It was the book we were consuming before going to sleep for the night. That communal experience of smiling and laughing out loud to the observations of Mr. Bryson as he stumbled down the Appalachian Trail made us fans for life. This book, "In a Sunburned Country,” , about his experiences as he stumbled through Australia, just adds to my fondness of him.

He seems to have found a real niche for himself. He is genuinely interested in the world around him; things big and small. He picks something that he doesn’t know anything about, travels to the key places in the world where that the thing exists, and writes about his experiences doing it. His writing is a pleasure, beautiful really, and funny and he is able to condense large ideas into small bite-sized chunks that are easy to understand. And with Australia, that topic aligns with his talents nicely. 

What I learned
  • The Australian native animal population is exponentially more likely to kill you than anywhere else in the world.
  • It is so large and hostile, that most of the country is unexplored.
  • The people are lovely. 
  • Even in this modern day, with comfortable airline travel, most non-Australians consider traveling there to be too remote. 
  • Even the locals don’t travel to the outskirts. They are too far and too hostile. 
  • Australia has a dark history like most countries and Bryson doesn’t shy away from any of it. 
In the end, Bryson loves the country and especially the people, and more especially, the remote people. I listened to the book as Bryson narrated it and that adds its own charm. This is his last paragraph: 

"Australia is mostly empty and a long way away. Its population is small and its role in the world consequently peripheral. It doesn’t have coups, recklessly overfish, arm disagreeable despots, grow coca in provocative quantities, or throw its weight around in a brash and unseemly manner. It is stable and peaceful and good. It doesn’t need watching, and so we don’t. But I will tell you this: the loss is entirely ours. You see, Australia is an interesting place. It truly is. And that really is all I’m saying."

Bill Bryson Books I have Read

"A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail”
"A Short History of Nearly Everything”
"At Home: A Short History of Private Life”
"Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe
"In a Sunburned Country”

References

"In a Sunburned Country,” by Bill Bryson, Published by Broadway Books 18 June 2000, Last Visited 30 April 2020,
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24.In_a_Sunburned_Country

"How to Speak Australian” By ANNETTE KOBAK, NYTs, 20 August 2000, Last Visited 30 April 2020,
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/00/08/20/reviews/000820.20kobakt.html

"AUDIO BOOK REVIEW: 'In a Sunburned Country' by Bill Bryson” By Susan Rife , Herald-Tribune/ Friday, 3 April 2015, Last Visited 30 April 2020, 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Books You Should Have Read By Now

By
When I started Terebrate back in January 2010, I always intended it to be a place to put my book reviews on whatever I was reading. Since then, a lot has happened in my professional life. I changed jobs, twice. I presented my collection of cybersecurity book reviews at the annual RSA Conference and suggested that the cybersecurity community ought to have a list of books that we all should have read by now. My current employer, Palo Alto Networks, liked the idea so much that they decided to sponsor it. We ended up creating the the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame  for cybersecurity books. We formed a committee of cybersecurity experts from journalists, CISOs, researchers and marketing people who were all passionate about reading. My collection became the the candidate list and for the past two years, the committee, with the help of community voting, has selected books from the candidate list to be inducted into something we are calling the Cybersecurity Canon. It has be
37 comments
Read more

Book Review: The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage (1989) by Clifford Stoll

By
Executive Summary This book is a part of the cyber security canon. If you are a cyber security professional, you should have read this by now. Twenty years after it was published, it still has something of value to say on persistent cyber security problems like information sharing, privacy versus security, cyber espionage and the intelligence dilemma. Rereading it after 20 years, I was pleasantly surprised to learn how pertinent that story still is. If you are not a cyber security professional, you will still get a kick out of this book. It reads like a spy novel, and the main characters are quirky, smart, and delightful. Introduction The Cuckoo’s Egg is my first love. Clifford Stoll published it in 1989, and the first time I read it, I devoured it over a weekend when I should have been writing my grad school thesis. It was my introduction to the security community and the idea that somebody had to protect these new-fangled gadgets called computers. Back in those days, author
3 comments
Read more

Book Review: Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground by Kevin Poulsen (2011)

By
Executive Summary Kingpin tells the story of the rise and fall of a hacker legend: Max Butler. Butler is most famous for his epic, hostile hacking takeover in August 2006 of four of the criminal underground’s prominent credit card forums. He is also tangentially associated with the TJX data breach of 2007. His downfall resulted from the famous FBI sting called Operation Firewall where agent Keith Mularski was able to infiltrate one of the four forums Butler had hacked: DarkMarket. But Butler’s transition from pure white-hat hacker into something gray—sometimes a white hat, sometimes a black hat—is a treatise on the cyber criminal world. The author of Kingpin , Kevin Poulsen, imbues the story with lush descriptions of how Butler hacked his way around the Internet and pulls the curtain back on how the cyber criminal world functions. In much the same way that Cuckoo's Egg reads like a spy novel, Kingpin reads like a crime novel. Cyber security professionals might know the
Post a Comment
Read more