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A Ramble through the World Hum Rankings

June 1, 2006 at 11:45 AM | by | Comment (1)



We don't care how many times they are maligned--we love listicles, and we've been enjoying World Hum's countdown of the Top 30 travel books of all time tremendously. We know that the guys over there are all about the sophisticated and intellectual aspects of travel, and hoping that they would choose a raucous collection of essays instead of a measured tome about the nature of a journey/our very being was, at best, a pipe dream. The highest chuckleheads ranked was No Mercy by Redmond O'Hanlon at #5, and Bill Bryson's In a Sunburned Country at #10, with Arabian Sands by Wilfred Thesiger clocking in today at #1.

That doesn't even begin to address our disappointment at a book that was missing from  the list altogether. It's one of our favorite travel books of all time: P.J. O'Rourke's collection of travel essays, called Holidays in Hell. The best essay by far is "A Ramble Through Lebanon", where P.J. was possibly the only person in 1984 to visit Lebanon as a tourist, in the midst of their civil war.

Despite the shelling, checkpoints, and general difficulty getting around, he manages to see most of the country's sights without getting killed. Or, as he puts it "It was the last time an American could travel in the country with a risk (rather than a certainty) of being kidnapped)." Also in the collection is teatime with an unreconstructed racist pre-apartheid South African, and a "36-hour In-Depth Report" from Managua.

The essays are the perfect counterpoint to the recent spate of writing by travel jocks/co-owners of the Half King and their pushy, flak-jacketed bravado. Maybe World Hum can list Holidays in Hell as #1A?

Related Stories:
·   Top 30 Travel Books [World Hum]

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World Hum's Top 30 countdown

Thanks for the post, and glad you liked our top 30 list.

I can assure you that O'Rourke is regular reading over at World Hum headquarters. Few writers have been consistently as insightful and as funny as him over the last couple of decades, and his essays for the Atlantic in recent years have been great.

But No. 1A? Hmmm. I'm not even sure he'd get my nod as the funniest travel writer around. I'd go with Bryson or maybe David Foster Wallace. He may have only written a handful of travel pieces, but they're classics, particularly the "Shipping Out" cruise essay he wrote for Harper's in the 90s.

Mike

mikewh on June 4, 2006 at 9:11 PM #Permalink

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