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Nabaza.net-The MarketPlace - Our Dumb World: The Onion's Atlas of the Planet Earth, 73rd Edition
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List Price: $27.99
Our Price: $18.47
Your Save: $ 9.52 ( 34% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Little, Brown and Company
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 081
EAN: 9780316018425
ISBN: 0316018422
Label: Little, Brown and Company
Manufacturer: Little, Brown and Company
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 256
Publication Date: 2007-10-30
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Release Date: 2007-10-30
Studio: Little, Brown and Company
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Editorial Reviews:
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Our Dumb World: The Onion's Atlas of The Planet Earth, 73rd Edition features incorrect statistics on all of the Earth's 168, 182, or 196 independent nations. It also features maps, including a fold-out world map at actual size. Readers will learn about every country from Afghanistan, "Allah's Cat Box," to the Ukraine, "The Bridebasket of Europe."
Today's news-parody consumer cannot possibly understand made-up current events without the context of fake world history and geography. That is why The Onion is publishing a world atlas: to help us.
Our Dumb World is an invaluable tool for any reader interested in overthrowing a weakened government in East Asia, exploiting a developing nation in Africa, or for directions to tonight's party at Erica's. It is a reference guide to 250,000 of the world's most important places, such as North Korea's Trench of Victory, the Great Human Pyramid of Egypt, and Saudi Arabia's superhighway, the Mohammedobahn.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Not very funny
Comment: This book was just not funny. I think a bunch of seventh graders could have written most of the entries. I wish had not purchased this book.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Funny!
Comment: If only high-school geography had been this funny! I bought this book as a gift for my brother and had to peek inside and couldn't put it down from laughing so hard! I may have to order another copy for my brother...Good thing his birthday is still over a month away!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Brilliant satire
Comment: The more you know about the world the funnier this book is. It spoofs cliches, ignorance and the world at large. Clever, funny and very entertaining.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Awesome! Great Gift.
Comment: I got this for my boyfriend's birthday gift. He loves the Onion "News" site, and was a Geography major in college (perfect, right?) I don't think there was a moment, until he was finished, that he wasn't carrying the thing around with him. He loved it, and I have to admit, I liked what he read out loud, too. It's great.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Insensitive and Inaccurate
Comment: Perhaps a better title for this book would be "Our Tragic World." Very few of the topics discussed here are dumb or funny. For instance, the Balkan section shows Croatia as the country of land mines. "Where all roads lead to serious injury." Bosnia is the country of war crimes. "Everyone is guilty of a genocide or two." Serbia is the country of ethnic cleansing. "Guy with Croat still stuck to sole of his boot." Is this funny? Really? Come on.
My fiancé was born in the Balkans and raised in Croatia. Several of his friends fought in the war on both the Serbian and Bosnian sides. Two of his Bosnian friends from Sarajevo were forced to fight. So reading "everyone is guilty of a genocide or two" is really not funny. Not when someone you know has gone through it.
The worst part is The Onion doesn't get the facts right. Effective satire gets all the facts right and then sarcastically alters how the subject is approached. In "Our Dumb World" some of the cities are located in the wrong place or spelled wrong. At the very least, the info should be accurate.
I do understand The Onion's humor. I own 2 of their books Dispatches from the Tenth Circle and Our Dumb Century and they are hilarious. I recommend buying one of those 2 books, but not this one. They have written about war and poverty before and done a brilliant job of it. A good example is when they wrote about a Barnes & Noble in Cambodia. They managed to denounce the tragic things going on in Cambodia, while at the same time pointing out our ridiculous comforts in America. That was true satire and it was done well.
However there is a fine line between witty satire and insensitivity. This book crosses the line in an unfortunate way every time. Instead, I recommend one of the other 2 Onion books I mentioned.
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