One for the Road
An Outback Adventure
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3.6 • 5 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
"A high-spirited, comic ramble into the savage Outback populated by irreverent, beer-guzzling frontiersmen." --Chicago Tribune
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Having spent months in Sydney without seeing the ``real'' Australia, American journalist Horwitz sets out to hitchhike solo through the continent's rugged interior. He discovers this to be infernally hot, flat and fly-ridden, with the only above-ground liquid to be found in the ``hotels'' (pubs) that dot the lone highway at irregular intervals. Aptly titled, One for the Road is as much a chronicle of the pubs along the way as of the scenery. In the Northern Territory, besides being the national beverage, beer is also a unit of measure and standard of currency. It is ``about a six-pack''or one beer every eight minutesto the next roadhouse; fixing a car's tail pipe costs ``a carton.'' Horwitz has a delightfully wry style and an eye for absurdity, evident in descriptions of himself warding off a sandstorm by wearing five pairs of jockey shorts on his headwith his nose sticking out of the fliesof a sailboat race on a dry riverbed and of the nonappearance of Halley's Comet. But he also appreciates the massive beauty of Ayers Rock, seat of Aboriginal culture, the wisdom of a prosperous cattleman and the peaceful charm of Broome, a tropical seaport, where he looks up the town's only Jewish family to celebrate Passover. A glossary of Aussie terms is provided.
