The Barefoot Hiker
A Brief History of Time
Coming Out to Parents
Cosmos
Crazy English
Dove
Endangered Pleasures
Endangered Pleasures
In Defense of Naps, Bacon, Martinis, Profanity, and Other Indulgencesby Barbara Holland
1995, Little, Brown and Company, ISBN: 0-316-37057-6
Barbara Holland takes up arms against America's current ethic of
industrious virtue. We work longer than we did twenty years ago, she says, and
eat more vegetables, but why get rich and live forever if our lives are gray
and arduous?
According to Holland, morning sex, bare feet,
gardening, dawdling over the morning paper, and idle summer vacations are more
fun than shopping malls and cable television, and certainly more fun than
working all waking hours. She exhorts us to rebel, to oversleep, and when we
get up, to eat bacon. Holland's recommended world includes not just smelling
the flowers, but calling in sick and lying down among them, if possible with a
friend, a bottle of wine, and a handful of strawberries. It calls for Fourth
of July parades and Christmases lasting twelve whole days.
She's also in favor of less respectable joys like happy hour, chicken gravy,
driving without our seatbelts, gambling, and swearing -- "one of our least
expensive and most flexible pleasures, ready to hand wherever we may
be" -- and laments those now snatched from us forever, such as cigarettes,
furs, ocean liners, and comfortable bathtubs.
Eloquent and merry, Holland persuades us to notice and guard small delights
that cheer our days.
Finding True Love in a Man-Eat-Man World
HAL's Legacy
The More Than Complete Hitchhiker's Guide
Mutant Message Down Under
Odyssey
Silicon Snake Oil