The Saint of Wolves and Butchers by Alex Grecian

This book grabs you from page one and never lets you go.  It starts off with a bus ride and a Nazi Rudolph Bormann making the trip up from South America to Kansas and meeting up with fellow German Jacob Meyer who helps him set up a life in Paradise Flats.  The two will form a ranch together and raise children though Rudolph, now Rudy Goodman's wife will die in childbirth with the third child.  For the most part, he keeps his children out of his business. Such as experimenting on humans like he did in the camps.  Then he gets hit by lightning and decides to start a church where he "heals" people and starts a flock of believers of the "purity doctrine". His son Heimleich helps to run the church.

But then someone recognizes him and calls the Roan Foundation a group that hunts down Nazis and other assorted bad guys.  They sent Ransom Roan the head of the foundation but he disappeared. So his son Dr. Travis Roan has arrived to find out what has happened to his father and to find out what this elderly woman has to say.  Then it turns out the woman is dead.  As are two other local people who have been brutally murdered.  Someone has experimented on them before killing them.

Travis has met state trooper Skottie Foster who is the only black female officer on the state trooper roster.  She agrees to go out to meet the elderly woman. Instead, they meet with her daughter and uncover a diary she left behind for her daughter detailing her experiences with Bormann when she was a guard at Ravenbrook but went to Mauthausen-Gusen to send some prisoners there as prostitutes and came under the scrutiny of the "wolf" Bormann.  She doesn't read the whole thing to him which is in their special code because it's too painful but promises to read more to them later.

Travis and his dog, Bear, have come to the attention of the local sheriff Goodman, a racist against every race including his own at times, who tries to use force against him to warn him off and winds up on the ground having it used against him.  But when Bear finds one of the bodies in the lake he is arrested by Goodman and his deputy Plunket who are both attacked by Bear

first. More like knocked over by Bear before Travis calls him off and tells him to disappear.  They arrest Travis for no real reason other than that they don't like him and hold him for the maximum amount of time they can hold him.  Skottie meanwhile has agreed to take Bear home with her to her mother's home with her ten-year-old daughter Maddy who immediately falls in love with Bear.  But Travis isn't done looking into the Nazi case and now he's looking into the church angle too.  And Skottie is getting pissed at being told to back off and leave this alone by everyone so she's helping him especially when things go sideways and the bad guys get serious who they'll hurt.

This is an excellent read that just flies right by and will keep you up nights reading it.  I love the characters of Travis who's been through so much and is filled with so much anger and is trying to control it and keep a cool head and think ahead of the bad guy.  Also, Skottie who must deal with her estranged husband who has decided to just now making an appearance and her stubborn mother and her precocious daughter who can't go a day without getting in trouble at school.  The plot seems fantastical but not too much to be plausible.  I really loved this book and I gi\ve it five out of five stars. 

Link to Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07465WN3S/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tkin_p1_i3

X-Men Origins: The Complete Collection by Stuart Moore (Writer), Jesse Delperdang (Penciler), Andy Lanning (Inker), Mattt HOlling worth (Colorist), Rob Steen (Letterer), Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa (Writer), Philo Noto (Artist, Colorist), Mike Carey (Writer), J. K. Woodward (Artist, Colorist), VC's Rus Wooton (Letterer), Sean McKeever (Writer), Mke Mayhew (Arist, Colorist), Nate Piekos (Letterer), Adam Freeman (Writer), Marc Bernardin (Writer), Cary Nord (Penciler), James Harren (Penciler), Chris Sotomayor (Colorist), Dave Sharpe (Letterer), Christopher Yost (Writer), Mark Texeira (Artist), John Rauch (Colorist), Todd Klein (Letterer), Trevor Hairsine (Penciler), Kris Justice (Inker), Val Staples (Colorist), David Tardin (Artist), Ibraim Roberson (Artist), Nathan Fairbairn (Colorist), Kieron Gillen (Writer), Dan Panosian (Artist), Ian Jannin (Colorist), Valerie D"Orazio (Writer), Karl Moline (Penciler), Rick Magyar (Inker), Morry Hollowell (Colorist), Duane Swierczynski (Writer), Leandro Fernandez (Artist), Steve Buccellato (Colorist), and Jeff Eckleberry (Letterer)

This massive tome includes not just X-Men but people from the X-Men universe.  Included are Cyclops, Iceman, Beast, Jean Grey, Nightcrawler, Wolverine, Colossus, Gambit, Sabretooth, Emma Frost, and Deadpool.  Each story has its own unique way of telling how that person either became an X-Man or came into contact with the X-Men, with the exception of Deadpool.

Hank McCoy would purposely get questions wrong on tests in order to not get too high a grade and look too smart.  Then he was asked to kick a football by the coach and he could really kick it so he became the star on the team taking the team to the nationals using the new mutant powers he was developing.  Before he was born his dad worked at the nuclear plant and an accident occurred causing him to take ten times the normal dose of radiation.  He worried about having an abnormal kid so Hank hid his smarts from everyone.  Then when his mutant gene kicked in he hid that too.  The Conquistador came knocking and demanded that Hank bow down to him and be his servant.  He then demanded that he bring the schematics from the power plant for cold fusion and he goes along with it for a while but in the end, he cannot give it to him and fights the guy and defeats him, but his parents and others find out what he can do.  That's when Professor X comes in and wipes some memories clean and gives him the opportunity to come to his school.

Emma Frost grew up with a demanding domineering father who believed that Frosts were special.  When her powers come about and Professor X comes to visit and help her she kicks him out of their house and protects her father whom Professor X has offered to force him to choose her going to his school.  Then she stumbled into the Hellfire Club with Sebastian Shaw after leaving home when she realizes she doesn't want to become her father.  Then after time spent in debauchery with Shaw, she opens a school for him to train mutants and realizes that she has become her father after all as she trains them mercilessly.

These stories are really good and I thoroughly enjoyed them especially Gambit's, Deadpool's, and Nightcrawler's.  Sabretooth was also interesting and involved Wolverine, of course.  Honestly, there isn't a story in here that isn't excellent.  These are some of your favorite characters with their origin stories and the artwork on some of these is just amazing like on Beast's and Deadpool's.  Also included are some older X-Men comics bits that show some of them getting their powers, or in the case of Emma Frost her going up against the X-Men.  This book is well worth the read and I give it five out of five stars. 

Link to Amazon:https://www.amazon.com/X-Men-Origins-Collection-Chris-Yost/dp/1302912208/ref=sr_1_fkmrnull_1?crid=3FAAV6KE51W06&keywords=x-men+origins+the+complete+collection&qid=1555085139&s=gateway&sprefix=X-men+origins+the+co%2Caps%2C170&sr=8-1-fkmrnull

Varina by Charles Frazier

Varina, written by Charles Frazier, author of Cold Mountain, is about Varina Howell Davis, wife of Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederate States of America.  It opens in 1906 with a middle-aged black man who has come to her to fill in parts of his past to her who is staying at a "health spa" likely for addiction to laudanum.  It seems that when he was a child he stayed with her family as a freed person but also as a child that they were taking care of after finding him being beaten in the streets.  Varina put him in with her children to be raised.  When Sherman was making his way South burning everything in his path and Richmond became indefensible, Jeff sent her and the children south heading toward Florida and Havana.  Varina tells this man, James "Jimmie Limber" Brooks his story and her own story of her life before meeting Jefferson and then their life together.

This book goes back and forth in time between the present, which is 1906 and 1865 and 1874 and 1842 onward.  This leads to whiplash as you are thrown willy nilly through the history of this woman's life.  In the beginning, she had it pretty hard in that she once came from a wealthy family, but her father squandered the money that he got from his father on bad deals.  Pretty soon there was nothing left.  She has no dowry to speak of and is now in a position to be asked to no parties to meet gentlemen when her father sends her to stay with a new family in the area the Davis's.  While staying with Joe Davis and his many daughters who seem to be of a similar age and whose mother is not much older than Varina who is seventeen and these daughters are in their teens.  No one is really sure what is going on in that house.  But his brother is Jefferson Davis and he made a handshake deal with him for some land, Brierfield where he made a mess of building it.  Jefferson hasn't felt like marrying anyone since his first wife died of malaria not long after they married.  But when he meets Varina he sees someone he can marry, though he does not love her.

Varina agrees to marry him after much ado. She has dreams that come true and she dreams of the Civil War and of the South losing and of her and Jefferson being President and First Lady and it ending badly for them.  She dreams of losing children she hasn't had yet.  As a matter of fact, it would be years before they would have their first child mainly due to the fact that they weren't on equal footing in the marriage and Jefferson's heart and mind were elsewhere.  He doesn't even leave her Briarfield in his will but leaves it to his brother to watch over her as he sees fit.  Which she knows he'll kick her out as soon as possible.  So she sets out war against brother Joe and Jeff to get her inheritance and refuses to sleep with Jefferson in case they have children from that union that would be in peril of losing their inheritance and being destitute.  At this time Jefferson is working in Washington D.C. in the government and without Varina there to help him he is failing at his job.  Then the Mexican-American War broke out and he left them to go off and fight in it.

The character of James Brooks is not fully formed and you don't feel as though you really know him at all.  It's like he's a prop for Varina to tell her story to which could have just as easily have been done to a newspaper editor or someone with whom you wouldn't want to feel a connection to but don't.  And the character of Laura who is staying at the place Varina is staying at in 1906 is superfluous.  She has no purpose in the story and wastes time and space.  Some of the histories behind Varina's story, if true, is entertaining.  The story of her laudanum taking and how she is not a "professional" taker but an average person taking it every day and her reasoning behind it are interesting.  This isn't a bad book, it just isn't a great book either. It's somewhere in between.  I'm just not that fond of his writing style.  I give it three and a half stars out of five stars.

Quotes

So, right now, I wish you every day a happy day and good appetite, warm feet, good friends & everything but forgetfulness. I do not think I would have longed for, or used the water of Lethe. Memory is truly psossession sometimes.

-Charles Frazier (Varina p 40)

Give a Yankee one little dried pea and three thimbles and he can buy groceries. Give him a boxful of cheap, shiny pocketknives and pistols to trade and he will turn it into a career. But give him a war, and he’ll make a fortune to last centuries. It’s not something they learn.  They’re saturated in it from birth. End result—we lost everything and they create thousands of new millionaires.

-Charles Frazier (Varina p 43)

What those miserable political animals are doing to that beautiful man [Jefferson Davis]—a man, let me be clear, I have wanted to kill many time sfor my own reasons—is disgusting and heartbreaking.

-Charles Frazier (Varina p 227)

Never acknowledge that the general culture is often stupid or evil and would vote out God in favor of the devil if he fed them back their hate and fear in a way that made them feel righteous. 

-Charles Fraizer (Varina p 328-9)

You’ll find that as you grow old, you stop bothering to hide the self you’ve been all along.

-Charles Frazier (Varina p 335)

 -And his ideas on war were equally abstract, He said, War is an affair of lines—a problem of geometry.

-Except pencil marks drawn on paper with a straightedge and a protractor don’t bleed.

-Exactly, V said.

-Charles Frazier (Varina p 337)

Link to Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Varina-Novel-Charles-Frazier/dp/0062405985/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2DPIETNU6JCE4&keywords=varina+charles+frazier&qid=1554903764&s=gateway&sprefix=varina%2Caps%2C173&sr=8-1

Grave Peril by Jim Butcher

Things are really hopping lately with Harry Dresden who has help from his friend Michael Carpenter, "The Fist of God" who holds one of the swords that contains one of the nails of the Crucifix in it.  When they go to the hospital to take care of a ghost, Agatha, who had been an abused wife and accidentally killed her daughter in trying to keep her quiet when her husband came home.  She then took an ax and went after her husband and killed both of them.  Right now she is singing a sweet song that is putting the babies and the nurses in the nursery to death.  When they attack her she runs to the Nevernever or the spirit world, so they are forced to follow her.  When they do they find that she has a magical wire attached to her which is agitating her which means that someone put it there to get her worked up and cross the line and harm humans.

Unfortunately, they run into Harry's godmother, a faerie named Lea with whom he made a bargain with when he was very young and didn't know what he was doing.  So whenever he comes to the Nevernever she tries to chase him down and get him to come with her and fulfill his bargain with her to be her slave.  He finds ways out of this and she can't bother him in the mortal world.  They are able to take care of Agatha and escape his godmother's clutches and get back to the mortal world where they have to explain what they're doing in a nursery.

Next thing Harry knows he's being called into Murphy's old partner's house, Michael Malone.  Malone retired after what happened in the last book with the loup-garous.  He was injured pretty badly and couldn't come back to work.  Well, when Harry gets there he needs Mrs. Malone to ask him in if he is to work any of his magic since Malone's place is a home and holds strong magical properties.  What he finds is a maniacal Malone handcuffed to the bed, but when he looks with his wizard's eye he sees a man who has a metal wire attached to him and someone has eaten away at his soul and a man who is in a great deal of pain.  He reaches down and pulls the wire loose and then throws it out the window and sets it on fire.  Malone will be fine for now unless the person or thing that did that to him in the first place comes back.

He comes to the realization after it attacks him and takes a bite out if his magic self, while he was dreaming that that was how it was getting into people, was through their dreams.  Now, he's weak, but he must get to Lieutenant Murphy and Michael both of who worked the case of Kravos several months ago, about a sorcerer who had a demon familiar and used it to abuse kids and women.  They caught him and killed the demon which means that the ghost of the demon is out doing all of this mischief.  But who is pulling the strings? And who is causing the turbulence in the Nevernever that is making it easier for beings to cross over?  He is too late to get Murphy, the demon has taken his form and is using his magic against him.  He is able to put Murphy in a deep enough sleep that she will not be able to dream and therefore cannot experience the nightmares the demon has set up for her.

On top of all this, he still can't tell his girlfriend Susan that he loves her.  When she finds his invitation to the Vampire Cornonation for Bianca she desperately wants to go so she can interview some vampires for her paper, but he refuses as it is dangerous and not worth going.  Bianca and Harry have a contentious history, but as he is the only representative of the White Council in the area she has to invite him.  But he doesn't have to go. He can be rude and not go and the White Council will probably not do much to him about it.  Michael and Harry will find themselves at this ball looking for the killer since more than vampires will be there representatives of all groups will be there.

This book is a massive page-turner. I was up late into the night more than once reading just one more page to find out what happens next.  I have to admit I felt stupid for not figuring it out sooner.  I hated that Murphy wasn't really in this book. But it was interesting to have Michael around and his pregnant wife Charity who doesn't like Harry.  Michael loses his sword and goes through a crisis of faith where he comes to believe that perhaps the sword was no longer meant to be in his possession.  And Harry needs Michael to be filled with faith, which is his strength, and at his back, because he has so few people he can trust to be there.  Murphy's the only other one.  Harry has to deal with losing part of his powers and not knowing what to do with Susan.  I really loved this book, but then I really love this series.  This time he's dealing mostly with ghosts but also with some vampires.  In the last book, it was werewolves or loup-garous.  It's always something different.  This is a fantastic book and I give it five out of five stars. 

Quotes

The married thing. Sometimes I look at it and feel like someone from a Dickens novel, staring at Christmas dinner.  Relationships hadn’t ever worked for me. I think it had something to do with all the demons, ghosts, and human sacrifice.

-Jim Butcher (Grave Peril p 60)

I took a seat on the worn wooden stool and drew my warm robe a little closer about me.  Trust me, wizards don’t wear robes for dramatic effect. They just can’t get warm enough in their labs.  I knew some guys in Europe who still operated out of stone towers. I shudder to think.

-Jim Butcher (Grave Peril p 133)

Okay. We have left Reason and Sanity Junction. Next stop, Looneyville.

-Jim Butcher (Grave Peril p 174)

Five white candles surrounded my summoning circle, the points of an invisible pentacle. White for protection. And because they’re the cheapest color at Wal-Mart.  Hey, being a wizard doesn’t make money grow on trees.

-Jim Butcher (Grave Peril p 231)

Revenge is like sex, Mister Dresden.  It’s best when it comes on slow, quiet, until it all seems inexorable.

-Jim Butcher (Grave Peril p 312)

It only takes a couple of these rough little episodes of life to teach a man a certain amount of cynicism.  Once a rogue wizard or three has tried to end your life, or some beserk hexenwolves have worked really hard to have your throat torn out, you start to expect the worst.  In fact, if the worst doesn’t happen, you find yourself somewhat disappointed.  So really, it was just as well that Godmother had caught up to me, in spite of my best efforts to avoid her.  I’d hate to find out that the universe really wasn’t conspiring against me. It would jerk the rug out from under my persecution complex.

-Jim Butcher (Grave Peril p 365)

Link to Amazon:https://www.amazon.com/Grave-Peril-Dresden-Files-Book-ebook/dp/B001650UDA/ref=sr_1_1?crid=11J2LG07NLPQH&keywords=grave+peril+jim+butcher&qid=1554728240&s=gateway&sprefix=grave+peril%2Caps%2C172&sr=8-1

The Immortal Hulk Vol 2: The Green Door by Al Ewing (Writer), Joe Bennett (Penciler), Lee Garbett (Artist), Ruy Jose (Inker), Le Beau Underwood (Inker), Rafael Fonteriz (Inker), Martin Simmons (Artist), Paul Mounts (Colorist), and VC's Cory Petit (Letterer)

Bruce Banner supposedly died killing the Hulk with him.  But there have been sightings of the Hulk around as Banner, who did not die after being shot in the skull and the heart with a special arrow by Hawkeye in an attempt to kill himself or see if he could be killed failed.  There has been some damage done to his brain due to the arrow. He has a harder time putting the pieces together and must depend on the hunches given to him by the green guy to figure out what is going on in a given situation where he is trying to seek justice for a person or a town.  These are short tales pieced together by the common thread of a reporter Jackie Mcgee. Jackie feels she is on to something when Banner's old college roommate Walter Langkowski, who once worked for Alpha Flight as Sasquatch, a being similar to the Hulk in that he was created with gamma rays but he changes into an orange fur ball, reaches out to her. Hulk absorbs all of his gamma radiation since he was up to something.  Hulk is trying to keep the Green Door closed because what's on the other side of the door is pretty awful, though there are others who keep trying to open it.

In this book Banner is walking toward home.  Alpha Flight is out to try to find him with the help of Lankowski.  But they're not the only ones looking for him.  They're just the first to find him.  The Avengers go out to meet him and find him changed from the old Hulk.  Tony feels the need to use the Helios Laser on him which would annihilate the area around him.  All that's left is a skeleton that the government takes.

Alpha Flight goes in search of him as a group of scientists experiment on him.  He breaks free and the government sends Carl Creel, the Absorbing Man after the Hulk to absorb his gamma radiation.  But things go wrong.  Can Alpha Flight get there in time to help?  This is an amazing comic and the ending is so great.  What is drawing the Hulk to this home?  And can he prevent the green door from being opened?  This is a fabulous book with incredible art and the colors just pop off of the page.  I give it five out of five stars. 

Quotes

For I do not exist: There exist  but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me.

-Vlandimir Nabokov (The Eye)

We are each our own devil, and we make this world our Hell.

-Oscar Wilde (“The Duchess of Padua”)

Link to Amazon:https://www.amazon.com/Immortal-Hulk-Vol-Green-2018-ebook/dp/B07M94XDPG/ref=sr_1_fkmrnull_1?crid=2D28XBDIJVI23&keywords=the+immortal+hulk+vol+2&qid=1554466184&s=gateway&sprefix=the+immortal+hulk+vol+%2Caps%2C170&sr=8-1-fkmrnull

Ultimate Spider-Man Vol 6: Venom by Brian Michael Bendis (Writer), Mark Bagley (Penciler), Art Thibert (Inker), Rodney Ramos (Inker), Transparency Digital (Colorist), and Chris Eliopoulos (Letterer)

In the previous comic, Captain Gordon gets killed as a result of a robbery and Gwen comes to stay with Peter and Aunt Mae which causes Mary Jane to become even more jealous. This coupled with the nightmares that she's been having and Peter not seeming to care about her life causes Mary Jane to break up with Peter.  Spider-Man must face off against a fake Spider-Man who is robbing places and giving him a bad name not to mention getting him shot by the cops.  His healing factor plus some help from S.H.I.E.L.D. help with that.

Aunt Mae gives Peter a box of his dad's old stuff and inside is a video of a picnic that he attended with a kid named Eddie Brock and his family.  So he decides to look up Eddie Brock and finds him going to college nearby and working on something that their fathers worked on that he's working on with Dr. Connors.  It's supposed to be a cure for cancer. It's a suit that you wear.  They used Peter's dad's DNA for the black blob of the substance.

One night Peter gets curious about it and breaks into the lab as Spider-Man and takes a small sample to test, but a drop gets on him and changes him into a black version of himself.  He runs into a man who he believes killed his uncle Ben and he is ready to kill that man.  He is barely able to rid himself of the suit.  When he tells Brock of his discovery and the dangers of the suit and that he destroyed the substance, Brock is furious.

But Brock had a second sample and Brock takes the sample for himself and becomes Venom.
He can't control it the way Peter could and he kills the janitor and the two security guards.  Peter, meanwhile, has a heart-to-heart with Mary Jane and says all the things that need to be said while Venom comes for him.

Eddie Brock is not a sympathetic character in this comic as he is in the Venom comics. He's to be blunt, an asshole and getting powers just made it worse.  Peter was looking for someone to connect with the past with and this is who he gets. On top of that, he has two angry females in his life: Mary Jane for doing what he does and Gwen for introducing her to Eddie.  Now more people know his secret too.  Peter just can't win in this comic which is what makes it so good.  I give it four and a half out of five stars.

Link to Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Spider-Man-Vol-6-Venom/dp/0785110941/ref=sr_1_1?crid=E8UCOVLX7JSZ&keywords=ultimate+spider-man+vol+6&qid=1554293837&s=gateway&sprefix=ultimate+spider-man+vol+%2Caps%2C169&sr=8-1

In a Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson

Bryson bases the title of his book on the famous and much beloved Australian poem "Core of My Heart" by Dorothea Mackellar where she states that "I love a sunburnt country/A land of sweeping plains,/ Of ragged mountain ranges/ Of droughts and flooding rains."  It pretty much sums up Australia.  And yes, Bryson realizes that the line is sunburnt and he made it sunburned.  Its a play on words.  He does get sunburned once during his time there.  This review is hard to write because, like Australia, this book covers a vast amount of interesting stuff.  It's hard to know where to start.

Australians are the nicest group of people you are likely to meet.  They have no history of having a revolution or a despot leading their government or of anything really bad.  Which is how they get forgotten so easily.  But the true forgotten people are the indigenous people of Australia the Aborigines.  They traveled to Australia by boat when people weren't really using boats to travel and somehow made it to Australia some 60,000 years ago.  And they are the oldest living continuous culture.   For a long time after the whites arrived, it was okay to kill them or lynch them without consequence.  Then in June 1838 in Myall, some cattle were rustled and then blamed on the Aborigines.  They gathered the men, women, and children up in a ball and played with them for hours before killing them with rifles and swords.  The city was outraged and put the men on trial and was at first acquited but a second trial found them guilty and they were then found guilty and hung.  This, however, did not end the violence against the Aborigines it just made it go underground.  And this was by no means the worse atrocity committed to Aborigines.  It just happened to be the only time that whites were brought to trial and found guilty for it. There's not much to see in Myall.  Most people go there to hunt for minerals.  The events there long forgotten.

The only time that they ran into rude or otherwise uncooperative Australians was in a little town in the Northern Territories called Darwin.  But a museum there more than made up for any inconvenience they received from the locals.  It contained an exhibit of the tragedy of Cyclone Tracy which came through in 1974 and leveled the place.  Included was a recording made by a priest of the cyclone which is very eerie and creepy.  The cyclone flattened nine thousand homes and killed sixty-four people.  Also included were stuffed animals from the area's diverse background that can probably kill you with the crocodile "Sweetheart" a male crock that killed fifteen boats before being accidentally killed when being moved to another area.  He was seventeen feet and seventeen hundred pounds.  But what he came here to see was the dead box jellyfish that was on display.  It is the most dangerous creature known to man.  The sea snake is also an interesting animal in that it is an inquisitive creature with a sweet nature but cross them and they can kill you three times over.  This is a nation where 80% of the world's most venomous plants and creatures live.    Also, animals and plants not native to the area have a way of thriving and trying to take over. For example, the rabbit that some Englishmen brought over to hunt and got loose and overtook Australia eating up foliage in the process. On top of that, the prickly pear was introduced to the Northern Territory and nearly took up every available space until it was destroyed.

Australia is a vast and empty land filled with all sorts of things and people as this book shows.  But a huge portion of the land has not been explored not to mention the plants and animals that haven't been cataloged. This book is part travelogue, part history story.  You'll be traveling down a road in Canberra or Melbourne, or Alice Springs, or any number of small tiny towns he stops to overnight while driving to different cities and he'll wander down a side street and discover some unknown place or about some unknown people like the Prime Minister who in the 1960s wandered out into the surf of the Queensland and disappeared and how those of Queensland is crazier than a bag of cut snakes. But that people of Queensland feel they are misunderstood by their fellow Aussies.  To me, it seems like the Florida of Australia.  Where crazy things happen all the time for no discernable reason.  Also included is a series of articles that he wrote about the Sydney 2000 Olympics, which is highly entertaining.  I really loved this book and give it five out of five stars.   

Quotes

 After years of patient study (and with cricket there can be no other kind) I have decided that there is nothing wrong with the game that the introduction of golf carts wouldn’t fix in a hurry. It is not ture that the English invented cricket as a way of making all other human endeavours look interesting and lively; that was merely an unintended side effect. I don’t wish to denegrade a sport that is played by millions, some of them awake and facing the right way, but it is an odd game. It is the only sport that incoporporates meal breaks.  It is the only sport that shares its name with an insect.  It is the only sport in which spectators burn as many calories as the players—more if they are moderately restless.  It is the only competitive activity of any type, other than perhaps baking, in which you can dress in white from head to toe and be as clean at the end of the day as you were at the beginning.

-Bill Bryson (In a Sunburned Country p 105-6)

No, the mystery of cricket is not that Australians play it well, but that they play it at all.  It has always seemed to me a game much too restrained for the rough-and-tumble Australian temperament.  Australians much prefer games in which brawny men in scanty clothing bloody each other’s noses.  I am quite certain that if the rest of the world vanished overnight and the development of cricket was left in Australian hands, within a generation the players would be wearing shorts and using bats to hit each other. And the thing is, it would be a much better game for it.

-Bill Bryson (In A Sunburned Country p 108)

“Are bushfires a big worry?” “Well, they are when they happen. Sometimes they’re colossal. Gum trees just want to burn, you know.  It’s part of their strategy.  How they outcompete other plants. They’re full of oil, and once they catch fire they’re a bugger to put out.”

-Bill Bryson (In a Sunburned Country p 162-3)

I often use alcohol as an artificial check on my pool-playing skills. It’s a way for me to help strangers gain confidence in their abilities and get in touch with my inner wallet.

-Bill Bryson (In a Sunburned Country p 242)

When even camels can’t manage a desert, you know you’ve found a tough part of the world.

-on the Outback Bill Bryson (In a Sunburned Country p 245)

I don’t know why, but every Olympics these days has a mascot. Moscow had a bear called Mischa. Nagano had cute snowflake creatures.  Atlanta, I believe had a person being shot on a street corner. 

-Bill Bryson (In A Sunburned Country p 319)

A cynic might conclude that our policy toward drugs in America is to send users either to prison or to the Olympics.

-Bill Bryson (In a Sunburned Country p 324)

     

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