One for the Road: An Outback Adventure

(One of the many books I've been reading for my post testicular cancer vow to see Australia.)In One For The Road by Tony Horwitz, a journalist takes a break from his newspaper job to hitchhike through the Outback in the summer (or is he on assignment?), and travels on the peripheral edge of Australia. Horwitz talks about Kerouac, but his journey differs from Kerouac’s. It lacks many things: vision, cohesive build, a passion and affection for others and a lack of commitment for presence in the moment. Horwitz turns people around like stones to see the light go through them see their perceptions and character flaws, he doesn’t apply this critical template to himself into any form of growth, or provide a deeper insight into Australia.There are some interesting sections, but most of the time, he’s highly dismissive of the towns he passes through, checking them off his list as he goes through them.But hey, there are definite passages that give you some information on the various towns, such as the opal miners in Coober Pedy knocking around the west coast of Australia, Nullabor desert, Broome, buying booze for aborigines in a dry territory, lobster fishing North of Perth. And some facts on various historical figures and landmarks, which I feel have been done better by Bill Bryson in Sunburnt Country. It does give you a hook into the area, but it's barbed.There are early GPS warnings of intellectual distance a borderline condescension (actually complete condescension):“Paul Theroux said that conversing with strangers is a peculiarly American compulsion: ‘To get an American talking it is only necessary to be within shouting distance and wearing a smile. Your slightest encouragement is enough to provoke a nonstop rehearsal of the most intimate details of your fellow traveler’s life.’”He compulsively suture literary quotes to describe what they can’t or use vocabulary words to the vernacular that would emotionally capture the moment or the person. Example “Ayers reminiscent perhaps of Shelley’s ode to Ozymandias.” When it doubt, Sir Phi Beta Kappa from Brown University and Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism retreats into classicism.Some highlights that made the book more enjoyable for me:Sidewalks are “footpaths.”In 1699, William Dampier was the first white man to record seeing a kangaroo: The land aninmals were only a sort of raccoon have very short forelegs but go jumping upon them as the others do, and, like them, are very good meat.”A quote from a gambler/loser he meets along the way: “Anyone can have a home and an honest job. But if a man lives by his wits, he can get by without all that. And stay free as a bird like me.”Eskimos have twelve words for snow, which explains why Australians have so many words for emptiness.And surprise, itinerant workers who drink away their paychecks, have no future, and drift from job to job and town to town, and aren’t well educated, hate blacks (“abbos”) and think aborigines are being given a free ride. “You probably don’t know why blacks are called bongs, Bong! That’s the sound they make when the bounce off the ‘roo bar. (The kangaroo bar is the metal guard on the front of a truck.).At the end, Horwitz stitches his finish together lyrics from a Talking Heads tune, Once In A Lifetime. I wanted to sing, “You may find yourself Reading a book about Australia that makes some points but goes nowhere and has a bad ending."There’s information geography and some sociology to glean from One For The Road. Kerouac offered the road as the fulfillment of a dream’s promise. It’s not here. But once travels for an emotional an affection for people along the way. The book is an exercise, and in the prose you can see he’s striving to be Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson, but the Horwitz stays embedded in his journalism and can’t pulsate prose to spark the fire of those writers. Horwitz doesn’t become anyone different than the person who started the journey (Unless you count that next time he travels he’s going to take his wife to be “restless together.’ Spare me!) He seems to congeal him instead of expand like Australia, however, he kept the emptiness in his heart and a desire to remain the marsupial pouch of its lower southeastern corner of his domestic life and a career ending finish in Martha's Vineyard. A real mold breaker!If you truly travel, you can’t maintain your distance from who you are, Horwitz truly never left home. I hitchhiked through his book, turned the pages with my thumb, but One For The Road didn’t have the heart to turn, stop and pick me up.

Tony Horwitz is fast becoming my one of my favorite authors. I loved "Confederates in the Attic" and "Baghdad Without a Map" and looked forward to reading "One for the Road", his very first book which describes his adventures hitchhiking across the Australian outback in 1987 at the age of 27.With only a backpack and a sense of adventure, he shares his journey with the reader, skillfully describing the mostly desolate terrain and the people he meets along the way. His sense of humor and instinctive quest for the quirky detail made me smile often and I tried to read this small 206-page book as slowly as possible because I just wanted it to last.I'm a mature city-dwelling grandmother and it's unlikely I'll ever stand by the side of the road with a cardboard sign and an outstretched thumb (or index finger as they do in Australia) waiting for a stranger to open a car door and share a little piece of his or her life with me. But for the moments that I was engaged in the book, Tony Horwitz brought me right there.He made me feel the 100-degree-plus heat, the flies so dense he had to squint his eyes. My head swirled with the countless bottles of beer he described drinking as he tried to ignore the fact that most of the drivers who picked him up were drunk. He slept in his clothes by the side of the road, met aboriginals and opal diggers and got seasick working as a deck hand on a fishing boat.And I also experienced the wonder of it all, the freedom of waking up in the morning and not knowing what the day will bring, the time to relish each moment, and the writer's eye to make the trip real for the many people destined to read his book. Occasionally, the book got a bit slow, but that is not a criticism, but rather just part of the reality of the experience.I really loved this book. And wish there were more books out there by this author. Hopefully, he'll write another book soon. And I know I'll be one of the first in line to order it.

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 comes to understand over his journey; the physical journey across a forbidding continent contrasts with his internal journey as a moden young man, a lapsed rebel, a faithful husband and a sentimentally observant Jew (Is this trip his own wandering in the desert, perhaps?)I was moved by the story of Horwitz's passage across the northwest of Western Australia (beginnning on page 136). It's here that he surrenders his obsession with getting to the next town, and begins to understand the weft and weave of his surroundings.The story of finding a Jewish family in Broome with whom to celebrate Passover--an Akubra sunhat acting as a makeshift yarmulke--warmed my heart, simply because I know that any true Australian would be equally welcoming to a displaced stranger.And the story of Anzac Day the following morning...well, I've never heard anyone capture the curious mixture of joy and pain that marks the Australian Memorial Day as succinctly as Tony did. An ostesnsible victory witout glory--what kind of a nation does this make? He summed it up in three paragraphs or so.Buy it, even if you never intend to visit Australia. It will help you understand the mind of an eventual Pulitzer Prize winner, and the experiences that opened his mind.Oh, by the way, Tony, I'm serious about the offer of a beer.

I like Tony Horwitz's style and think he has chosen his adventures wisely. This is not as amusing and interesting as "Into the Blue" but still a good read.

Purchased this for a relative who has travelled the outback extensively, relating to locations and conditions were so accurately descriptive, thoroughly good read, and not easily put down.Loved it.

Well written and full of adventure. It makes you want to visit OZ.. Try his book Blue Latitudes, too.

This book is great fun to read. It isn't as cerebral as Horwitz's other books, but great read. It was his first book, and gives some hint of what is to come. He is a fantastic author who died too young. I was wrecked when I heard he had died. No more books from my favorite author....

It felt like I was reading something from another century (well, it actually was, but you know what I mean, so dated) but it was an entertaining tale of an American guy who hitchhikes or bums his way around Australia. A little taste of Bryson in there, not a lot of analysis, some bits of history elucidated lightly... I wouldn't say it's a highly compelling book but it did keep me reading to the end and the author came across as a pretty much OK guy.