Endangered Pleasures: In Defense of Naps, Bacon, Martinis, Profanity, and Other Indulgences - Hardcover

Holland, Barbara

3.74

375 ratings by Goodreads

9780316370882: Endangered Pleasures: In Defense of Naps, Bacon, Martinis, Profanity, and Other Indulgences

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0316370886 ISBN 13: 9780316370882

Publisher: Little, Brown & Co., 1995

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ENDANGERED PLEASURES IN DEFENSE OF SELF-INDULGENCE AND SIMPLE LUXURIES 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 our 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 the small delights that cheer our days.

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Review:

First cigars and gin topped the list. Then red meat, Cadillacs, coffee with caffeine, and sleeping late all began to edge toward extinction. Barbara Holland makes an impassioned defense of life's little pleasures in a book that will entertain diehard sinners, comfort the secretly licentious, and encourage those who just need a little nudge to abandon jogging and no-fat salad dressing.

About the Author:

Barbara Holland's books include Secrets of the Cat, Hail to the Chief, and One's Company. Her articles have appeared in Arts and Entertainment, Country Journal, and Smithsonian. She lives in Bluemont, Virginia.

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