All the trouble in the world

Best-selling political humorist P.J. O’Rourke tackles the “fashionable worries”—the enormous global problems that are endlessly in the news and constantly on our minds but about which we mostly don’t have a clue, including overpopulation, famine, ecological disaster, ethnic hatred, plague, and poverty. He visits Bangladesh and Fremont, California. The two places have the same number of people per square mile, so how come George Harrison never held a concert to benefit suburban Californians? O’Rourke goes to Somalia and discovers that there’s plenty of food, you just have to be armed to get it. He travels to the Earth Summit and lets the hot air out of global warming theorists. He tours the old Communist bloc to ponder why, if government regulation is the answer to pollution, the most government-regulated countries were the most polluted. From angry chiggers in the jungles of Peru to irate coeds in Ohio, All the Trouble in the World is P.J. at his absolute best—with seriously hilarious takes on the issues that shape our contemporary world and plenty of swipes at the hilariously serious people who pontificate about them.