All The Trouble In The World: The Lighter Side Of Overpopulation, Famine, Ecological Disaster, Ethnic Hatred, Plague, And Poverty

In ALL THE TROUBLE IN THE WORLD, best-selling 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. O'Rourke crisscrosses the globe asking not just "What's the answer?" but "What the hell's the question?" In his chapter on overpopulation (titled "Just Enough of Me, Way Too Much of You") he visits first Bangladesh, then Fremont, California. The two places have the same number of people per square mile. Is the problem really that Bangladesh is too crowded? If so, how come George Harrison never held a concert to benefit suburban Californians? For his chapter on famine ("All Guns, No Butter") O'Rourke goes to Somalia and discovers that there's plenty of food, you just have to be armed to get it. He dismisses the self-righteous "anti-hunger" types back home, saying that they "cannot resist a dig at us gluttonous bourgeoisie who've climbed way up on the food chain where we don't belong. I guess they believe that if I don't eat this steak, the cow will come back to life, vomit its corn and silage, and these can be fed to people in Chad." The author travels to the Earth Summit in Rio 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. And while hiking in the Amazon, inspecting our deteriorating environment, he discovers that rain forests are such horrible places that all we have to do to preserve them is give everyone who lives there a chance to drive a New York City cab. O'Rourke examines the faddish issue of multiculturalism by returning to his old college campus, where the air is full of such ideas, and then by going to Bosnia, where minority empowerment has reached its logical conclusion and the air is full of something else entirely.