No Holiday: 80 Places You Don't Want To Visit (Disinformation Travel Guides) (Paperback)

by Martin Cohen (Author)
Key Phrases: useless information, United States, New York, North Korea (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review
Cohen scribbles over the problems of the world with a big fat green flourescent marker -- TNT Magazine, London, June 2006

Martin Cohen's definitely has the corner on the anti-fun guide book market -- Nomadx.org: July 2006

No Holiday: 80 Places You Don't Want To Visit turns the traditional travel guide on its head. -- The Observer, Travel Picks, June 18 2006

None of it is pretty, but No Holiday reminds us there is another way to see the world. -- GetLostBooks.com, May 2007

a concise geo-political primer that needs to be added to the nation's middle-school curriculum, fast -- Doug Harvey in LA Weekly, Wednesday, August 30 2006

gives the scoop on exotic locations where you would never dream of traveling -- Vox Magazine, May 2007

Product Description

In this first Disinformation Travel Guide, Martin Cohen visits exotic locations (80 of them!) but with a different aim than the usual travel book: to seek out the suffering and injustices, not to skirt them. We will see the dark red waters of "Murdering Creek" in Australia, silent testament to the ongoing genocide of the world's oldest people... we will visit the olive groves of Palestine where the helicopter gunships of the Israeli Army patter by like so many gigantic marauding insects, and we will queue up to see not museums and art galleries, but the more sinister monuments of politics, like the academy of terror funded by the CIA at Fort Benning in Georgia, or the poisoned shores of the Aral Sea revealing an abandoned biological warfare center....

We will visit not the great "sights" but the great "sores," the forever cursed cites of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where so many died, as Churchill might have said, for so little. We'll enter the no-man's lands of the demilitarized zones of past conflicts-between North and South Korea, between Syria and Israel, even between Catholic and Protestants in Northern Ireland.

Martin Cohen's popular and accessible introductions to philosophy have been translated into many foreign languages, except the language of Voltaire, near whose Chateau he now lives and writes. (But in a cowshed, not in a Chateau.) He has a PhD in Philosophy of Education from Exeter University, has published several books and written for The Guardian, Times Higher Education Supplement, and The Independent.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 208 pages
• Publisher: The Disinformation Company; illustrated edition edition (June 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 193285729X
• ISBN-13: 978-1932857290
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.8 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #907,390 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

40 of 61 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Disinformation Indeed, October 1, 2006

By	Dingo - See all my reviews

This book is basically a jingoistic liberal's guide to how westerners/whites have plundered the earth. Fair enough, but the author reaches such amazing heights with his rhetoric that it just begins to sound silly at a certain point (it's not his platform, it's the inane sermonizing that every piece seems to devolve into that is the problem.)

Highlights include an evangelical section on how the Somali people are doing quite well for themselves without any form of government but little is mentioned of the atrocities we read about perpetrated against women and the extreme poor there. Cut off a guy's arm for stealing a chicken and then blame it on the white man! Iron-fisted warlords? Who are they?

Another highlight is the section condemning the Bronx Zoo for having debased an African pygmy OVER 100 YEARS AGO. Do we really need to hate the Bronx Zoo of today because it was run by racists over a hundred years ago? Clearly no progress has been made since then whatsoever so let's trot out the pygmy and pretend that the civil rights movement never actually happened. La la la la la.

You may actually enjoy this book if you hate whites/westerners/Israelis as much as the author clearly does and need more porn to sate your little fixation. Really, though, this book is little more than a truly naked example of the banal finger-pointing and cheesy racial demonizing that radical liberalism has been driven to on the one-way road to nowhere called political correctness.

5 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars If you can't stand the heat..., March 22, 2007

By	Evan Dump "xpgltr" (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews

...stay in your air conditioned drip dry bunker watching FOX news, Mr. Jones. For the rest of us, there's still plenty dirt to be learned and fessed up to.