Holidays in Hell
In Which Our Intrepid Reporter Travels to the World's Worst Places and Asks, "What's Funny About This?"
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A "hair-raisingly hilarious" journey through danger zones from Belfast to Gaza, by the #1 New York Times–bestselling author (Vanity Fair).
"Tired of making bad jokes" and believing that "the world outside seemed a much worse joke than anything I could conjure," journalist and political satirist P. J. O'Rourke decided to traverse the globe on a fun-finding mission, investigating the way of life in the most desperate places on the planet, including Warsaw, Managua, and Belfast.
The result is Holidays in Hell—a full-tilt, no-holds-barred romp through politics, culture, and ideology. The author's adventures include storming student protesters' barricades with riot police in South Korea, interviewing communist insurrectionists in the Philippines, and going undercover dressed in Arab garb in the Gaza Strip. He also takes a look at America's homegrown horrors as he braves the media frenzy surrounding the Reagan-Gorbachev summit in Washington DC, uncovers the mortifying banality behind the white-bread kitsch of Jerry Falwell's Heritage USA, and survives the stultifying boredom of Harvard's 350th anniversary celebration.
Packed with classic riffs on everything from Polish nightlife under communism to Third World driving tips, Holidays in Hell is one of the best-loved books by "one of America's most hilarious writers" (Time).
"Wickedly amusing." —The Baltimore Sun
"Funny, outrageous, perceptive." —The Washington Post Book World
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this cheeky follow-up to Holidays in Hell, former war correspondent O'Rourke trades battle zones for more appealing travel destinations, often with his family in tow. Deciding after the Iraq War that he was "too old to be scared stiff and too stiff to sleep on the ground," O'Rourke switches to travel writing after 21 years covering various conflicts. The exotic a sailing trip to the Gal pagos Islands in "Republicans Evolving" or a horse trek through the mountains of Kyrgyzstan in "A Horse of a Different Color" rub shoulders with the more mundane a family skiing vacation in "Round on the Ends and Hi!' in the Middle," a trip to Disneyland in "The Decline and Fall of Tomorrow" and all of them share O'Rourke's razor wit. The family skiing vacation is made more hilarious by its being in Ohio (his eldest daughter doesn't like long hills), and the plethora of wildlife observed during the Gal pagos jaunt become stand-ins for our country's political parties. The majority of essays were assigned by Forbes Life and reworked by O'Rourke for this collection; "Capitol Gains," the O'Rourke family's aborted tour of the Washington, D.C., sights is previously unpublished. O'Rourke loses none of his sly humor, finding many opportunities to lampoon American politics under his new guise as a traveling family man.
