Vacationland: True Stories from Painful Beaches

New York: Viking - An Imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2017. First Printing Stated . Hard Back. Fine/Fine. 5 3/4" x 8 1/2. 257 Pages. As new book with as new dust jacket. The $25 flap price is in place. John Hodgman is an older white male 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 of middle age that connects them. Vacationland 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 pets and which to kill with traps and poison. There is also some advice on how to react when the people of coastal Maine try to sacrifice you to their strange god. Though wildly, Hodgmaniacally 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 be the children of bright potential they were and settle into the failing bodies of the wiser, weird dads that they are. Contents in 17 Chapters: The Bookkeeper for the Church of Satan, Dump Jail, Mongering, 309.28, Rocks on Top of Other Rocks, Pills Are Science, Daddy Pitchfork, Never Food, Graveyard Fun, Maine Humor A Kingdom Property The IT Guy for Duck Dynasty, So This Is the Skin of My People, Vacationland, A Little Beyond the Limits of Safe Travel, and Yippee.