Holidays in Hell Some books have appeared in my life at exactly the moment I needed or could appreciate them. This is one of those books.

It was the autumn of 2003, and I was spending two weeks in Paris as a prologue to a three-month internship in Prague. (Grad school rocked.) It was the first time I’d been in a country whose language I didn’t speak. My French is abominable, and my Czech was non-existent (I did later learn some Czech; sadly, all that remains in my memory banks is “Can I buy a metro ticket?”)

I had seminars through the mid-afternoon, but after that I was free to wander around (my very favorite pastime.) I was spending an awful lot of time in the Gilbert & Jeune bookstores, which had a respectable number of new and used books in English. I reached down and plucked this book from the bottom shelf, then sat down on the floor to flip through it. Fifteen minutes later I had to buy the book and leave the store, because I was making a public spectacle of myself by laughing so hard.

P. J. O’Rourke was a foreign correspondent for Rolling Stone magazine from the 1980s through 2001, and Holidays in Hell is a collection of his travel stories, published in 1988. These weren’t the most sought-after travel locales. O’Rourke went to places like Lebanon, Nicaragua, Poland, El Salvador, Jim Bakker’s Heritage U.S.A., Northern Ireland and Panama, and got as drunk as he could on whatever local liquor was available.

But the article that was making me burst forth with those embarrassing snorting laughs was “Among the Euro-Weenies,” written from Paris in a fit of pique as O’Rourke tried desperately to get a visa for Libya in time for the coolest of the 1986 bombings.

I’ve been over here for one grey, dank spring month now, and I think I can tell you why everyone with an IQ bigger than his hat size hits the beach at Ellis Island. Say what you want about ‘land of opportunity’ and ‘purple mountain majesty above the fruited plain’, our forbearers moved to the United States because they were sick to death of lukewarm beer - and lukewarm coffee and lukewarm bath water and lukewarm mystery cutlets with mucky-colored mushroom cheese junk on them. Everything in Europe is lukewarm except the radiators. You could use the radiators to make party ice. But nobody does.

I loved this entire book, especially “Seoul Brothers,” “What do they do for fun in Warsaw?” and “The Holy Land - God’s monkey house.” But there were two quotes in Holidays in Hell that I’ve carried with me, quotes that helped prepare me for the next three months of editing articles about the former Soviet republics and the Balkans.

The first wasn’t actually O’Rourke’s, but it was on his dedication page:

Often the more you understand, the less you forgive. - Jillian Becker, Director of Institute for the Study of Terrorism

The second is from his introduction:

Half the world’s suffering is caused by earnest messages contained in grand theories bearing no relation to reality - Marxism and No-Fault Auto Insurance, to name two. Earnestness is just stupidity sent to college.

And oh, it is true. As someone who can spell Srebrenica, I tell you it is true.