The Pleasure Police

📖 The Scoop

Why in the world have the healthiest, wealthiest, safest and most pampered people in the history of humanity turned into a nation of pushy, whiny, misinformed nutrition nazis, teetotalers, prudes and abstainers? That's what David Shaw, an unapologetic lover of good food, fine wine, a great cigar and other sensual pleasures, wants to know. In The Pleasure Police, Shaw, the Pulitzer Prize-winning media critic for the Los Angeles Times, sets out after the neo-puritans, armed with a robust appreciation of life, and that rarest of modern qualities, a willingness to look past hype and alarmism and rely on facts. Shaw is amazed and disturbed that so many people seem hell-bent on ruining the pleasures of everyone else. The religious right thunders on about what consenting adults do in the bedroom; the feminist left wants to make flirtation a crime; hysterical health advocates tell us to be afraid of eating anything except tofu and kale; a tidal wave of repressive anti-smoking laws are passed based on extremely dubious second-hand smoke research; charlatan diet gurus use guilt and quackery to create a forty-billion-dollar-a-year industry; total strangers feel free to comment on the alcohol content of their fellow diners' beverages. Shaw takes after these zealots with gusto, wit and just the right bit of malice. In his view, life is a feast, not an endurance test, and he takes great glee in mocking the absurdity and self-righteousness of the crusades of the pleasure police.

Genre: Humor / General (fancy, right?)