Vacationland

Although his career as a bestselling author and on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart was founded on fake news and invented facts, in 2016 that routine didn't seem as funny to John Hodgman anymore. Everyone is doing it now.

Disarmed of falsehood, he was left only with the awful truth: John Hodgman is an older white male monster with bad facial hair, wandering like a privileged Sasquatch through three wildernesses: the hills of western Massachusetts where he spent much of his youth; the painful beaches of Maine that want to kill him (and some day will); and the metaphoric haunted forest ot middle that connects them.

collects these real-life wanderings. and through them you learn of the horror of freshwater clams, the evolutionary purpose of the mustache, and which animals to keep as and which to kill with traps and There is also some advice on how to react when people of coastal Maine try to sacrifice you to their strange god.

Though wildly, funny as usual, it is also a poignant and sincere account of one human facing his forties, those years when men in particular must stop pretending to the children of bright potential they were and settle into the failing of the wiser, weird dads that they are. --front flap