Whew. Just when the religious right and alarmist left were closing in ever so smugly with an overload of everything--and they do mean everything--gives you cancer, makes you fat or is immoral, David Shaw rescues us with a well-researched defense of pleasurable activities. As Shaw, the media critic for The Los Angeles Times, quotes a sociologist friend, "Don't people realize every scientific study shows that the single best thing you can do for your health is have fun?" Apparently not, as Shaw points out with an investigation into our Puritanical past, the excesses of the 1960s and the contradictions of living in fear during our current improved standard of living. The bottom line? Relax and enjoy.
From Publishers Weekly
If you like to drink, eat, smoke and have sex without the "pleasure police" intruding on your fun, this is the book for you. In a reasoned and provocative look at America's new abolitionists, Pulitzer Prize-winner Shaw analyzes how the politically correct "Puritans and the congenital alarmists are increasingly trying to leech all joy from our daily lives." Shaw rages against the "nutrition Nazis," who take all the satisfaction out of eating good foods, and the "neo-Prohibitionists," who refuse to acknowledge the beneficial effects of red wine; and although he is against cigarette smoking personally, he laments that he cannot enjoy a cigar at an outdoor baseball game because of the antismoking frenzy in the country. He saves his best barbs for the "bluenosed brethren" who would outlaw sex as either sinful, immoral or unhealthy. He ridicules those who make presidential sex habits a test of "character" and castigates the Catholic church for its "assault on pleasure, especially sexual pleasure." He calls for the legalization of prostitution, condemns feminist Andrea Dworkin and chides those who advocate censorship. An irreverent guide to enjoying the good life.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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