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    Holidays in Heck
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    Holidays in Heck
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    Holidays in Heck
    Ebook270 pages3 hours

    Holidays in Heck

    By P. J. O'Rourke

    3/5

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    About this ebook

    Holidays in Heck takes the reader on a globe-trotting journey to far-reaching places including China, Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan and the Galapagos Islands. The collection begins after the Iraq War, when P.J. retired from being a war correspondent because he was "too old to keep being scared stiff and too stiff to keep sleeping on the ground." Instead he embarked on supposedly more comfortable and allegedly less dangerous travels - often with family in tow - which mostly left him wishing he were under artillery fire again. The result is a hilarious and oftentimes moving portrait of life in the fast lane - only this time as a husband and father of three.

    Adventures include:

    - The first stag hunt in Britain after hunting had been banned. If the British had been half as caring about Indians and American colonists as they are about animals, they'd still rule the world.

    - A month-long tour of mainland China's economic hubs where P.J. learned that the entire Chinese concept of political freedom and individual liberty can be summed up in the words, 'New Buick'.

    - A harrowing horseback ride across the mountains of Kyrgyzstan - no towns, no roads, no people. "If something happened to my horse it would be shot. For me, the medical treatment wouldn't be that sophisticated."

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAtlantic Books
    Release dateNov 1, 2011
    ISBN9781611859966
    Author

    P. J. O'Rourke

    P. J. O'Rourke is the bestselling author of ten books, including Eat the Rich, Give War a Chance, Holidays in Hell, Parliament of Whores, All the Trouble in the World, The CEO of the Sofa and Peace Kills. He has contributed to, among other publications, Playboy, Esquire, Harper's, New Republic, the New York Times Book Review and Vanity Fair. He is a regular correspondent for the Atlantic magazine. He divides his time between New Hampshire and Washington, D.C.

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    Reviews for Holidays in Heck

    3/5

    24 ratings3 reviews

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    • 3/5
      An amusing compilation of essays about traveling to strange and unusual places - one of O'Rourke's specialties.

      Although I find some of his political views overbearing, I don't particularly mind - he's funny. That's what I read him for. This selection has some really droll and lackluster bits that wouldn't fit well, but there are some pieces which make the whole thing better - the China and Kyrgyzstan bits are great.

      Decent, if you don't mind skipping around.
    • 3/5
      Nowhere near as good as Holidays in Hell, I think P J is getting bored, or his priorities have certainly changed with a wife and 3 kids. There is barely any material to get under the skin of liberals, environmentalists, or Europeans, which is too bad, because that is what made his previous books so entertaining. If you like P J then there is probably enough in this book to warrant reading it. If this is your first P.J. O’Rourke book, read Holidays In Hell, Parliament Of Whores, or All The Trouble In The World.
    • 3/5
      Sometimes it seems as if I’ve been reading political humorist P.J. O’Rourke forever, so when I spotted Holidays in Heck in the “new books” section of my local library a few days ago I grabbed it. This one bills itself as “the follow-up to the classic Holidays in Hell” -a 1989 book I thoroughly enjoyed - the premise being that O’Rourke, this time around, will tell us about some of his family vacations in place of describing the hellhole war zone days of his prior life. (O’Rourke swore off war zones after the Iraq war.)Holidays in Heck is written pretty much in the expected P.J. O’Rourke style, but his observations do not seem to have quite the bite of his earlier work (even though the book is largely rewritten from articles published as early as 2003 in magazines such as Forbes, The Weekly Standard, and World Affairs). Perhaps this is because of the nature of the subject matter, or because O’Rourke places less emphasis on politics this time than he usually does, but this one reads as a tamer version of his earlier writing style.The book, for some reason, chooses to open with what I found to be its weakest chapter, one called “Republicans Evolving” in which O’Rourke describes a 2003 trip taken to the Galapagos Islands with some of his Republican friends. Largely one-joke repeated too many times to be funny ( as his Republican friends’ first concern always seems to be the edibility of every creature they observe on the islands), this chapter is thankfully not representative of those that follow. Subsequent chapters find O’Rourke, sometimes with his entire family in tow, visiting places such as the National World War II monument in Washington D.C., Brays Island Plantation in South Carolina, China, the mountains of Kyrgyzstan, Hong Kong, Disneyland, or Afghanistan. Along the way, he even manages to go skiing in Ohio (who knew?), riding to the hounds in England, and convinces his family to vacation at home one year.Holidays in Heck is an interesting travelogue, and much of what O’Rourke had to say as he passed through various layers of “heck” made me smile. Surprisingly, I began to look forward to the observations of O’Rourke’s two little girls, “Muffin” and her younger sister “Poppet,” as their father wryly reported on their innocent world view. Seeing a bit of the world through the fresh eyes of children is never a bad thing.Rated at: 3.0