Down Under 澳大利亚游记 9780552997034 rb kindle 网盘 umd 极速 下载 pdf mobi

After tales from the USA and Britain, Bill Bryson turns his roving eye to Australia, the only island that is also a continent and the only continent that is also a country. It is the driest, flattest, most desiccated, infertile and climatically aggressive of all the inhabited continents. It has more things that can kill you in a very nasty way that anywhere else. Yet when Bill Bryson travelled to Australia he promptly fell in love with the country. And who can blame him? The people are cheerful, the cities safe and clean, the food is excellent, the beer is cold and the sun nearly always shines. He tries to find out why Aussies are so cool, digging up a past that reveals convicts, explorers, gold diggers and outlaws.

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As his many British fans already know, bearded Yankee butterball Bill Bryson specialises in going to countries we think we know well, only to return with travelogues that are surprisingly cynical and yet shockingly affectionate. It's a unique style, possibly best suited to the world's weirder destinations. It's helpful here: Bryson's latest subject is that oddest of continents, Australia.

For a start, there's the oddly nasty fauna and flora. Barely a page of Down Under is without its lovingly detailed list of lethal antipodean critters: sociopathic jellyfish, homicidal crocs, toilet-dwelling death-spiders, murderous shrubs (yes, shrubs). Bryson's absorbing and informative portrait is of a terrain so intractably vast, a land so climatically extreme, it seems expressly designed to daunt and torment humankind.

This very user-unfriendliness throws up another Aussie paradox. If the country is so hostile how come the natives are so laid back, so relaxed? As Bryson shuffles from state to state, he seeks the key to the uniquely cool Australian character and finds it in Australia's tragicomic past, her genetic seeding of convicts, explorers, gold diggers, outlaws. This is a country of lads and mates, of boozy gamblers--nowadays mellowed by sunshine and sporting success.

Down Under is a fine book. So it may not be quite as deliciously malicious as Bryson's The Lost Continent, nor as laugh-out-loud funny as Neither Here Nor There. But so what? A Bill Bryson on cruise control is better than most travel writers on turbodrive. --Sean Thomas --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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I drove in the gloomy frame of mind that overtakes me at the end of every big trip. In another day or two I would be back in New Hampshire and all these experiences would march off as in a Disney film to the dusty attic of my brain and try to find space for themselves amid all the ridiculous accumulated clutter of half a century's disordered living.

...

It seemed a particularly melancholy notion to me that life would go on in Australia and I would hear almost nothing of it....Life would go on and I would hear nothing , because once you leave Australia, Australia ceases to be. What a strange, sad thought that is.

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I can understand it, of course. 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...

当知道一切都可能消失在一缕烟里，你绝对会感激这一切。

They chose as leader an Irish police officer named Robert O’Hara Burke, who had never seen real outback, was famous for his ability to get lost even in inhabited areas, and knew nothing of exploration or science.

He would, he announced, continue to reside in Sydney and commute to Canberra as duties required. As you can imagine, this caused an uproar among Canberra’s citizens, presumably because they hadn’t thought of it themselves. What made this particularly interesting is that John Howard is by far the dullest man in Australia. Imagine a very committed funeral home director – someone whose burning ambition from the age of eleven was to be a funeral home director, whose proudest achievement in adulthood was to be elected president of the Queanbeyan and District Funeral Home Directors’ Association – then halve his personality and halve it again, and you have pretty well got John Howard. When a man as outstandingly colourless as John Howard turns his nose up at a place you know it must be worth a lo...

Then I decided to come up with a new slogan for Canberra. First I wrote: ‘Canberra – There’s Nothing to It!’ and then ‘Canberra – Why Wait for Death?’ Then I thought some more and wrote: ‘Canberra – Gateway to Everywhere Else!’,

Give Australians an issue and they will argue it so passionately and in such detail, from so many angles, with the introduction of so many loosely connected side issues, that it soon becomes impenetrable to the outsider.

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Bill Bryson is the bestselling author of The Lost Continent, Neither Here Nor There, Notes from a Small Island, A Walk in the Woods and Notes from a Big Country. He and his family live in America

书籍介绍

It was as if I had privately discovered life on another planet, or a parallel universe where life was at once recognizably similar but entirely different. I can't tell you how exciting it was. Insofar as I had accumulated my expectations of Australia at all in the intervening years, I had thought of it as a kind of alternative southern California, a place of constant sunshine and the cheerful vapidity of a beach lifestyle, but with a slightly British bent - a sort of Baywatch with cricket…' Of course, what greeted Bill Bryson was something rather different. Australia is a country that exists on a vast scale. It is the world's sixth largest country and its largest island. It is the only island that is also a continent and the only continent that is also a country. It is the driest, flattest, hottest, most desiccated, infertile and climatically aggressive of all the inhabited continents and still it teems with life - a large proportion of it quite deadly. In fact, Australia has more things that can kill you in a very nasty way than anywhere else. This is a country where even the fluffiest of caterpillars can lay you out with a toxic nip, where seashells will not just sting you but actually sometimes go for you. 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 irresistable currents, or left to stagger to an unhappy death in the baking outback. Ignoring such dangers - yet curiously obsessed by them - Bill Bryson journeyed to Australia and promptly fell in love with the country. And who can blame him? 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. Life doesn't get much better than this.