Holidays in Heck

Written by P. J. O'Rourke

Narrated by Dan John Miller

P. J. O’Rourke is one of his generation’s most celebrated political humorists, hailed as “the funniest writer in America” by both Time and The Wall Street Journal. Twenty-three years ago, he published the classic travelogue Holidays in Hell, in which he trotted the globe as a “trouble tourist,” a chaos rubberneck, sight-seeing at wars, rebellions, riots, political crises, and other monuments of human folly. After the Iraq War—“too old to keep being scared stiff and too stiff to keep sleeping on the ground”—he retired from what foreign correspondents call “being a s**thole specialist.” But he couldn’t give up traveling to ridiculous places, often with his wife and three young children in tow. Usually he was left wishing he were under artillery fire again.

O’Rourke’s journeys take him to locales both near (and nearly bizarre) and far (and far from normal). Having made a joke that Ski magazine takes seriously, he winds up on a family ski vacation—to Ohio. The highest point of elevation is the six-foot ski instructor his wife thinks is cute. Convinced by an old friend and one too many drinks that “a horse trek is just backpacking on someone else’s back,” he finds himself (barely) in the saddle, crossing the mountains to a part of Kyrgyzstan so remote that the Kyrgyzs have never seen it. He visits Kabul for the food and conversation (excellent lamb chops and a droll after-dinner story about the mullah and the cow). He even takes his kids to his erstwhile home away from home, the bar at the Foreign Correspondents Club in Hong Kong.

Holidays in Heck shows P. J. O’Rourke in top form—a little older, a little wiser, going to the bathroom a little more often, but just as darkly funny as he was in Holidays in Hell. Here is a hilarious and often moving portrait of life in the fast lane, as he’s always lived it—only this time with the backseat driver that marriage entails and three small hostages to fortune strapped into the booster seats.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brilliance Audio
• Release date: Nov 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9781455835003

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.

Reviews for Holidays in Heck

[hadriantheblind · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

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.

[samsattler · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

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

[zmagic69 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

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.