“This isn’t a book to promote tranquility, and readers in quest of satisfaction should look elsewhere,” writes Paul Fussell in the foreword to the original, sharp, tart, and thoroughly engaging work. The famous author concentrates his lethal wit on habitual euphemizers, artistically pretentious third-rate novelists, intimate puritans, as well as the “Disneyfiers of lifestyle.” He movements through the inflammatory title piece over the morality of falling the bomb on Hiroshima to a amusing disquisition within the “naturist motion”, to essays on the meaning of the Indy 500 race, on George Orwell, and on the change in men’s chivalric impulses toward their moms. Fussell’s “frighteningly acute eye for the manners, mores, and ethnic tastes of Americans” (New York Times Publication Review) can be abundantly evident within this engaging dissection from the opponents of truth, beauty, and justice.