Holidays in Hell Writer Picks Top Travel Books

Who better to recommend a good travel book than the author of Holidays in Hell, a self-described guide to the "world's worst places"? Now that PJ O'Rourke's follow-up, Holidays in Heck, is on shelves, O'Rourke reveals his six favorite travel books in the Daily Beast:

• Domestic Manners of the Americans, Fanny Trollope: After living "two miserable years" in Cincinnati, Anthony Trollope's mother wrote "the great anti–de Tocqueville account of America." With complaints of pigs running the streets and general filthiness, "she sounds like my mother on the subject of foreign travel."

• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson: "Actually, nothing happens on this journey," writes O'Rourke. The subjects just get wasted, scare some people, and behave poorly. "From this Thompson created a work of enduring genius."
• Steaming to Bamboola, Christopher Buckley: Although it's a comic novel, O'Rourke calls Buckley's writing "awfully realistic," saying Bamboola "is what Two Years Before the Mast would have been like if Richard Henry Dana Jr. had had a sense of humor."

Click for the complete list. (More P.J. O'Rourke stories.)