Endangered Pleasures: In Defense of Naps, Bacon, Martinis, Profanity and Other Indulgences [Paperback]

Barbara Holland (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1996

A delightfully funny and quirky look at the pleasures of modern life challenges the American work and productivity ethic, defends the good things on life (and the so-called ""bad""), and serves as a reminder that relaxation and leisure are necessary to our well-being.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com 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.

From Publishers Weekly

"Perhaps it's a good time to reconsider pleasure at its roots," declares Holland (Secrets of the Cat), introducing this collection of entertaining, genteel meditations. As the subtitle hints, the author, living in the Virginia countryside, is no sybaritic renegade but a woman who can find happiness in antinomies like "Working" and "Not Working," "Buying Things" and "Saving Money," and "Going Out" and "Staying In." She writes with conversational ease, and some observations linger: To the miserly, "a penny spent is a penny mourned"; mail is "one of life's small recurring pleasures"; sports, "unlike life, are played according to rules." Holland even reveals that she drives without using her seat belt. Illustrations.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers (July 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0061010316
• ISBN-13: 978-0061010316
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,068,471 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

33 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Temptation Well-Remembered and Written in "Pleasures.", June 29, 2001

By 

Anthony G Pizza "trivialtony" (FL) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Endangered Pleasures: In Defense of Naps, Bacon, Martinis, Profanity, and Other Indulgences (Paperback)

In "Driving Beltless," one of 67 essays forming "Endangered Pleasures," author/temptress Barbara Holland writes that driving without seat belts, once considered "a basic civil right," now "takes its place with Eve's apple among the heady stolen pleasures."

Hidden among the summer shade trees of her Bluemont, VA home, Holland writes as a modern day Eve chronicling hidden, missing pleasures in a nostalgic, suburban Eden. Her curmudgonous "Wasn't The Grass Greener" finds her post-expulsion, wistfully remembering telegrams, clotheslines, radiators and tangible, fading societal remnants. Here she praises seasonal, small, slightly sinful luxuries readily available if occassionally politically incorrect.

Sensuality rules "Endangered Pleasures" in taste (coffee, martinis, even cigarettes), touch (bare feet, naked bodies in shower, bath and bed, wearing fur in an apologetic essay) sound (songs of youth, whistling, profanity), and above all, sight ( July 4, Christmas, books and morining paper, emotional blankets covering the four seasons, travel modes and motivations). Holland also indulges in slight sins of lust (morning sex), gluttony (justifications of the day's three meals), schadenfreude (her section on disasters and crowd behavior after the Phillies' 1980 World Series win) and supposed sloth (her defense of working and not working, and of gardening as a form of work, are alone worth the book price).

Holland also understands small, measurable triumphs of early childhood ("the first 10 or 12 years are just one triumph after another") early adulthood ("We studied for the career of being adults...we thought we had to have opinions on everything.")and parenthood ("Having a child around is more fun than being one, since we're free to leave the small world for the large one whenever we get bored.")

Some Holland-praised pleasures became unpopular for understandable, if not completely agreeable, reasons. But she correctly states many benign indulgences fell to what author Robert Ringer called "absolute morality," a governmental/societal/Puritanical mindset distrusting and discouraging pleasure as immoral and unfair while praising pain and self-denial as noble and necessary. Authors like Barbara Holland and books like "Endangered Pleasures" remind us life is too short to take too seriously or studiously, or to deny self without greater purpose. Like chocolate fudge cake, "Endangered Pleasures" should be enjoyed rarely in small slices, but enjoyed to its fullest nonetheless.

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This Girl Knows How to Have Fun!, May 27, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Endangered Pleasures: In Defense of Naps, Bacon, Martinis, Profanity and Other Indulgences (Paperback)

This book will make you laugh...at yourself and others who try to make life a series of grim responsibilities. Barbara Holland is such an unabashed pleasure-seeker, I had to keep checking the cover to see that it was really written by a woman! The things she embraces are truly guilty pleasures no self-respecting, typically suffering woman of the '90's would admit to. Thank God for her! As a fellow sybarite, I appluad this book's celebration of all that is deliciously decadent. What's great is reading about guilty pleasures you may not have even thought of. The overriding theme of the book is not how great martinis, bacon or naps are in and of themselves, but how anything that you enjoy that way can really lift your spirits...and if it's forbidden, all the better! In this overwrought era of taking everything too seriously, wondering what food will kill us next and what disease we'll catch, this book is like a ray of sunshine. Read this book with a martini, in the tub or just before taking that leisurely mid-day nap!

P.S. I would add to the list: gossip, flirting, buying splurges at bookstores, massages (perferably voluntary and spontaneous) dancing when home alone to music everyone else makes fun of, watching "Lifetime", any Judith Krantz novel, candles, body lotion and decolletage.

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of my all time favorites, August 16, 2003

By 

Constance D'Ulisse "dulisse" (philadelphia, pa USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Endangered Pleasures: In Defense of Naps, Bacon, Martinis, Profanity, and Other Indulgences (Hardcover)

Ms. Holland is one of my favorite authors and this is my favorite of her books. This is one to treasure, to reread when life is looking particularly dreary. In "Endangered Pleasures" Ms. Holland looks at many of the things we've given up on the advice of the government, our doctors and other do-gooders. Bacon (yum), naps, calling out sick, cursing, all the things we're not supposed to do or enjoy because they're bad for our health, the economy, the nation. Read this on the bus, you'll get a seat to yourself because other riders will move away from you because you're laughing outloud.