No Holiday: 80 Places You Don't Want to Visit...

by Martin Cohen

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.

Genres: Travel

208 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2006

About the author

Martin Cohen is a well-established author specializing in popular books in philosophy, social science and politics.

I have a book being published November 2018 on the sociology of food this year, called provocatively 'I Think Therefore I Eat'! with an emphasis on how historical philosophers have approached the 'food issue'. It's a popular 'explainer' kind of book, already given a nice plug by Eater!

Food is very much an interdisciplinary area - though it is often treated in a narrow, specialised way. There is the nutritionist's perspective, the economist's, the cook's, the ecological... the list is as long as we want. And each perspective is 'valid', but only partial. So I think it's a good place to bring in a little philosophy.

Part of the book looks at the historical views of well-known philosophers on food (they have indeed had some!) but most of it looks at modern theories which are still philosophical in a fundamental sense, including for example, the ideas that we are living in an 'obesogenic' environment, or that our bodies, far from being guided by a single essential soul, are really constructed out of an uneasy alliance of micro-organisms.

It's published by Turner in the US mid-November, and this is their page for the book including my video trailer if you would like to see a little movie!

For rights inquiries, please contact my literary agent:

Mark Gottlieb
Literary Agent
Trident Media Group
mgottlieb@tridentmediagroup.com
(212) 333-1506
https://www.tridentmediagroup.com/

So, the book contains analysis of many current food-related debates,
including the vexed question of the obesity epidemic, which is much more complicated than merely people eating the wrong things, a fact that won't surprise many of us have explored by trying to go on a diet ourselves!

But perhaps the 'USP element' in it is more on what those venerable philosophy gurus had to say anyway. On the social science side, these two extracts give the flavour:

1. If you went by TV and the newspapers, you could be forgiven for thinking that celebrities, be they chefs or models, have more of a handle on the key food issues than qualified doctors and nutritionists – let alone philosophers. And you might well be right. Because the worst thing about food science, the elephant in the room, is that it’s not just the opinions that are changing – but the ‘facts’ themselves shift too. To get to the bottom of the food question. requires us to tease apart the strands of diet science and biochemistry, as well as an ounce of economics and a dash of human psychology.

Rather the obesity epidemic is an economic issue as I put in back in 2016 in an article for the Guardian newspaper. "The causes of the epidemic are complex, spanning the social sciences to biology and technology"

I took the same issue a bit further when I compared figures for childhood obesity - and found more evidence that, as I wrote, "It's poverty, not individual choice, that is driving extraordinary obesity ..."

Incidentally, the same sort of disgraceful thing applies to educational achievement. Did you know, that you can pretty much do away with exams (hooray!), as exam results mimic exactly a student's position in the class hierarchy (boo!). Shocking and disgraceful and no one - of course - s gong to do anything about it.

So that's really the the Politics of Food Science – as I put it for Gavin Wren's fabulous Brain Food Magazine at Medium , wri

Reviews

[Bill · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a virulently anti-American tirade disguised as a humorously written book about places not to visit on this planet. Americans seem to be responsible for everything. And dictators and repressive regimes get off with a slap on the wrist or worse, Americans are really responsible for their really bad behavior. I am not a very politcal animal but this book seems skewed and distorted toward the view of the far left in the manner of Stalinist or Maoist rampages against capitalism. After all this is said it is well written and quite funny if you do not mind the anti-western, a la cold war, diatribe.

[Gibb · Rating 4 out of 5]

A hilarious introduction to world geo-politics. It's a bit mad, and the style is well, 'tacky' (those awful cheap images - but they work as a sort of postmodernist joke!) but once you get into the swing of it 'unputdownable'. At least when on holiday!

[Derek · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm hoping to go to every place listed in this bk.

[Ken · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting as a coffee table book or a diversion. I am generous for what it purports to mock but wish that there had been more humor.