The Pleasure Police: How Bluenose Busybodies and Lily-Livered Alarmists Are Taking All the Fun Out of Life

The reading public seems to have an insatiable appetite for books pointing out the annoying and infuriating in American life--from The Death of Common Sense to In Defense of Elitism to I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional. The Pleasure Police, David Shaw's wickedly gleeful defense of good sex, good booze, good food and a good cigar, should hit the same nerve.

Why, Shaw wonders, are so many people 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 warn against eating anything except tofu and kale; a tidal wave of repressive antismoking laws is passed based on extremely dubious secondhand 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 out the absurdity and self-righteousness of the crusades of the pleasure police.

The Pleasure Police is the book to be read while sipping an icy cold martini.