Holidays in Heck

P.J. O’Rourke is one of today’s most celebrated political humorists, and he has been hailed as “the funniest writer in America” by both Time and The Wall Street Journal. Two decades ago he published the classic travelogue Holidays in Hell, in which he traversed the globe on a fun-finding mission to what were then some of the most desperate places on the planet, including Warsaw,Managua, and Belfast.

Holidays in Heck 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 essays take O’Rourke on a whirlwind of adventures, beginning at the National Mall in Washington, which he describes as having been designed with the same amazing “greatest generation” aesthetic sensibility that informed his parents’ living room. We follow him as he takes his family on a ski vacation (to the Aspen of the Midwest—Ohio—where the highest point of elevation in the state is the six-foot ski instructor that his wife thinks is cute). And later he experiences a harrowing horseback ride across the mountains ofKyrgyzstan—no towns, no roads, no people, and, whoops, no P.J. in the saddle.

The result is a hilarious and often moving portrait of life in the fast lane—only this time as a husband and father.