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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 910
EAN: 9780375706134
ISBN: 0375706135
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 224
Publication Date: October 05, 1999
Publisher: Vintage
Release Date: October 05, 1999
Sales Rank: 145242
Studio: Vintage
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
"A high-spirited, comic ramble into the savage Outback populated by irreverent, beer-guzzling frontiersmen." --Chicago Tribune
"A fascinating insight into what we're all about on the highways and byways along the outback track." --The Telegraph (Sydney)
Swept off to live in Sydney by his Australian bride, American writer Tony Horwitz longs to explore the exotic reaches of his adopted land. So one day, armed only with a backpack and fantasies of the open road, he hitchhikes off into the awesome emptiness of Australia's outback.
What follows is a hilarious, hair-raising ride into the hot red center of a continent so desolate that civilization dwindles to a gas pump and a pub. While the outback's terrain is inhospitable, its scattered inhabitants are anything but. Horwitz entrusts himself to Aborigines, opal diggers, jackeroos, card sharks, and sunstruck wanderers who measure distance in the number of beers consumed en route. Along the way, Horwitz discovers that the outback is as treacherous as it is colorful. Bug-bitten, sunblasted, dust-choked, and bloodied by a near-fatal accident, Horwitz endures seven thousand miles of the world's most forbidding real estate, and some very bizarre personal encounters, as he winds his way to Queensland, Alice Springs, Perth, Darwin--and a hundred bush pubs in between.
Horwitz, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of two national bestsellers, Confederates in the Attic and Baghdad Without a Map, is the ideal tour guide for anyone who has ever dreamed of a genuine Australian adventure.
"Lively, fast-paced and amusing . . . a consistently interesting and entertaining account." --Kirkus Reviews
"Ironical, perceptive and subtle . . . will have readers getting out their maps and itching to follow Horwitz's tracks. . . . The internal journey is his finest achievement; he allows the reader into his heart, to go travelling with him there, sharing his adventures of the spirit." --Sunday Times (London)
Amazon.com Review:
After a year working an office job in Sydney, author and Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaperman Tony Horwitz finds himself longing for the open road. Spurred on by a colleague's "Aren't you a little too old for this game?" he sets off on a 7,000-mile adventure around Australia, hitchhiking to Alice Springs and beyond: through desolate mining towns, sheep stations, countless bush pubs (do not attempt to match his beer intake), and the forbidding, Martianesque emptinesses of Australian deserts. On the way he encounters hostile, friendly, and downright strange natives; jumps a train; survives a harrowing accident; and uses his relentless sense of humor to face down a cyclone: I prop my pack against the fence as a windbreak. Huddled behind it, I pull on two pairs of pants, three shirts, four pairs of socks--my entire wardrobe in fact, except for the dung-covered shirt and five pairs of elastic-waisted underwear. No room for dignity here, at the center of a cyclone. I put the jockey shorts over my head, one pair at a time, fitting the fly over my nose to let a little oxygen in. A wily melange of tenderness, eye-popping lunacy, and occasional white-knuckled fear, One for the Road will leave you yearning to have the never-ending-blue Oz sky above, the flavor of that red, red dust in your mouth, and a tinnie to wash it all down with. --Jhana Bach
Average Rating: 
Rating: -
I would recommend all of his books, but there is still only one I will go back and read again and again.....Confederates in the Attic. The best.
Rating: -
It is an enteratining (if slighty dated) view of Australia from an American Hitchker's point of view. I did find I was not totally sucked into the book, but his descriptions were rich and un-biased. Throughly enjoyable
Rating:  -
This is Tony Horwitz's intial entry his into travel series preceding "Confederates in the Attic" and "Blue Lattitudes". As a Yank living in Sydney Australia, he leaves his newspaper to journey 7,000 miles, in the mid 1980s, across the outback and western Australian coastline with his thumb and a ruckasack. Horowitz has a gift for being descriptive of not only the landscape but also the people, capturing not only their lifestyle but even their dialogue. That includes both intersting and amusing descriptions ... Read More
Rating: -
As another American who lived in Australia for many years, let me assure any prospective buyer of this book that the author really gets the place.
He started out like many, seduced by life in megalopolitan Sydney, thinking that the superficial similarites between two essentially suburban cultures mean that there's little for an American to learn from his adopted home.
Life on the road teaches him otherwise.
There's a certain melancholy to life in Australia, which Horwitz ... Read More
Rating: -
In this book we see Pulitzer Winning writer Tony Horwitz hit the open road hitchiking around Australia. On his journey he gets enough rides from strangers to "fill a Rehab Clinic " 3 times over. Tony is introduced to an Outbackworld where distance are measured in beers consumed., i.e. a short trip is known as a "six pack of beer" whereas a long journey is refered to as 24 cans of beer!!!. The author describes how hitchiking can be a very jarring way to travel as you are stranded alone for hours trying to get a ... Read More
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