Holidays in Hell collects P. J. O’Rourke’s dispatches from the world’s late-Cold-War disaster zones: El Salvador, Lebanon, the Philippines, South Korea, South Africa, Poland, Northern Ireland, Nicaragua, and assorted other places where ideology, violence and foreign policy have made a mess and then put a hotel bar beside it.

O’Rourke’s method is political travel writing by way of the hangover. It is fast, rude, observant, morally suspicious, and often very funny in the exact way one probably should not be funny when discussing civil war, dictatorship and American intervention. It is very "American" and that is partly the point, but you won't be the first to find it entirely obnoxious. But for those who love him, or are curious, he writes from inside the grotesque theatre of global politics, watching liberal pieties, conservative fantasies, revolutionary slogans and diplomatic language all fail to survive contact with actual streets, soldiers, pilots, bureaucrats and bullets in the grillwork. It's perfect of the era writing to really see how America's media was ticking. 

Think of this as journalism as nasty weather: comic, bleak, over-caffeinated, and allergic to anyone who thinks history can be tidied up with a position statement.

First printing hardcover, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1988. Dust jacket present with visible edge wear, rubbing and creasing, especially along spine and corners.  Boards and pages clean and solid, with light toning. Readable, presentable copy of the first edition.