- Paperback: 192 pages
- Publisher: William Morrow & Company (1 July 2000)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 006095647X
- ISBN-13: 978-0060956479
- Product Dimensions: 20.5 x 13.8 x 1.2 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 766,230 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
The minute the alarm clock punctures our dreams, we go to work. We have convinced ourselves that productivity is the name of the game and that leisure is a notorious sign of laziness. In Endangered Pleasures, Barbara Holland insists that enough is enough. It's time to kick back, relax, and relish the truly good things in life. "Delightfully quirky".--The Boston Globe.
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OBVIOUSLY the best possible time to wake up is in the June of our tenth year, on the first day of summer vacation. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
OBVIOUSLY the best possible time to wake up is in the June of our tenth year, on the first day of summer vacation. Read the first page
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
ENDANGERED PLEASURES is perhaps mistitled as it's not credible to think any of the 67 things and activities listed, from the morning paper to cigarettes to bare feet to weekends to gambling to winter to babies, are actually in peril of extinction. "Unappreciated" might be more a apropos term instead of "endangered". The book's subtitle says it all more succinctly: IN DEFENSE OF NAPS, BACON, MARTINIS, PROFANITY AND OTHER INDULGENCES.
Author/essayist Barbara Holland has a remarkable talent for perceiving the small details of life and living. Or rather, a talent for remembering what she perceives and subsequently bringing it to the attention of the lumpish rest of us. For instance, on the "being there" phase of travel:
"The hee-haw of the ambulance in the foreign streets sings with a pure and alien glamour, quite unrelated to the irritating scream of emergency vehicles back home." Now, I've noticed that on my own overseas walk-abouts, but would never think it worth mentioning to the folks back home.
And, on a more sobering note, regarding the psychology of crowds:
"Face to face with, say, Adolph Hitler at a table for two, we would have jeered at his passions, protested, flounced out in a snit. In a crowd of thousands, all cheering and brandishing fists, we might have stood in the path of the electric current, felt the blood of common cause rise joyfully in our throats, and cheered too ... Deep inside each of us lurks a chained lemming, struggling to break free, and we need to keep an eye on it."
I admire Holland's talent for social commentary. She reminds me of Andy Rooney, but without the crankiness. Rooney might like to think he's a national treasure; Barbara truly is.
Author/essayist Barbara Holland has a remarkable talent for perceiving the small details of life and living. Or rather, a talent for remembering what she perceives and subsequently bringing it to the attention of the lumpish rest of us. For instance, on the "being there" phase of travel:
"The hee-haw of the ambulance in the foreign streets sings with a pure and alien glamour, quite unrelated to the irritating scream of emergency vehicles back home." Now, I've noticed that on my own overseas walk-abouts, but would never think it worth mentioning to the folks back home.
And, on a more sobering note, regarding the psychology of crowds:
"Face to face with, say, Adolph Hitler at a table for two, we would have jeered at his passions, protested, flounced out in a snit. In a crowd of thousands, all cheering and brandishing fists, we might have stood in the path of the electric current, felt the blood of common cause rise joyfully in our throats, and cheered too ... Deep inside each of us lurks a chained lemming, struggling to break free, and we need to keep an eye on it."
I admire Holland's talent for social commentary. She reminds me of Andy Rooney, but without the crankiness. Rooney might like to think he's a national treasure; Barbara truly is.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
A marvelous compilation of the best pleasures of life. At times it made me feel guilty for enjoying myself so much. Holland's premise that we are loosing sight of simple, wholly self indulgent pleasure, hits the nail on the head. I found things I do and others I am certain to try. She missed my favorite of all, " the sun nap". My family thinks I'm part lizard and part cat. I can't seem to get past a good sunbeam without stopping for a quick solar charge.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
21 reviews
33 of 35 people found the following review helpful
Temptation Well-Remembered and Written in "Pleasures."
30 Jun 2001
Format: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
This Girl Knows How to Have Fun!
27 May 1999
Format: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
One of my all time favorites
16 Aug 2003
Format: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.
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