One for the Road

by Tony Horwitz

Vintage, 211 pp., $12 (paper)

We can thank Vintage for reissuing this decade-old account of Tony Horwitz’s adventures in the Australian outback. Horwitz, a Pulitzer Prize winner and staff writer at The New Yorker, moved to Sydney with his Australian wife way back in the Eighties and discovered his adopted country had rekindled his youthful penchant for hitchhiking. So, armed with a map, a rucksack, and little more than a notion that there was a great deal to see outside the city limits, Horwitz takes leave from his newspaper job and heads for the bush. In a journey punctuated by one violent car crash, dozens of pub visits, heartache, and not a few bizarre characters, this wandering Jew paints a sprawling comic portrait of a place most Australians wouldn’t recognize any better than most Americans would the landscape of West Texas. The glossary alone is worth the price of admission, while the travelogue itself emerges as timeless.

This article appears in January 21 • 2000.

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