Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3435 in Books
• Published on: 2007-10-30
• Released on: 2007-10-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 256 pages

From AudioFile
If you chortle and guffaw at the arch and snarky offerings of America's funniest publication, THE ONION, then OUR DUMB WORLD is a compendium of international satire you will cherish. Presented with pompous flourishes and big-voiced aplomb, OUR DUMB WORLD cheekily deflates the egos and efforts of every land on earth in a mock-educational melee of geopolitical and cultural hatchet-jobbery that only the most uptight listener will reject as sophomoric and over the top, which this audio candy certainly can be. OUR DUMB WORLD falters occasionally where many sound adaptations tend to--when very funny text just doesn't translate to narration. And the elaborate coffee-table-book illustrations are hard to emulate in audio. Nonetheless, THE ONION will be bring tears to most listeners' eyes with this offering. D.J.B. 2008 Audies Finalist © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

USA Today
"Bottom line: Laughed my head off."

Newsweek
"This is the best parody since the National Lampoon published its phony newspaper, "The Dacron Republican-Democrat," in 1978."

Customer Reviews

Brilliant satire
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.

Awesome! Great Gift.
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.

Insensitive and Inaccurate
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.