Our Dumb World

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 (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine

Starred review from December 31, 2007
The first all-new publication from the Onion
's stable of mad satirists since 1999's Our Dumb Century
, this globe-spanning volume raises the bar for topical humor. Known for their savage, irreverent newspaper parody, the Onion
staff delight in playing up stereotypes and skewering perceptions, and they have picked an enormous playground in which to do so; this skewed world atlas compiles enough fictional facts to tickle—and probably offend—just about everyone. Profiling every country in the world—from the United States (“The Land of Opportunismâ€) to Greenland (“The Largest Land Mass on Earthâ€) to “The Who Cares Islandsâ€â€”this handsome parody is visually indistinguishable from genuine reference materials, but with jokes crammed into every inch, from topographical maps (“Largest Mayan Casino in Mexicoâ€) and tiny vital statistics boxes (Syria's ethnicity: “Anti-Semitic Semitesâ€) to historic timelines (Ireland, 1387: “Luck of the Irish runs outâ€) and photo captions (“Emergency shipments of food, water, and Bono reach Sudanâ€). The group's humor can demand a rarified kind of knowledge—as in the entry for Nicaragua, which revolves entirely around the now-ancient Nintendo game Contra—ensuring that some jokes will fall flat; for anyone with a cultural pulse, however, the hit-to-miss ratio will be high. Eminently browsable and compulsively rereadable, this is an essential book for fans of Stewart, Colbert and (of course) the Onion.

December 15, 2007
This isn't just any atlas; it's the "Onion"'s atlas. Readers familiar with the satirical newspaper and its previous publications will here find the intelligent and biting humor they've come to expect. The book is a quality product with a seemingly built-in market. But the market for readers who would read an atlas for entertainment is small, and the number of "Onion" readers in that market's subset, probably smaller. In the Library of Congress record, the publisher states, 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. Fair enough. Libraries with a large contingent of "Onion" readers will probably do well to consider this purchase, and certainly some readers will be clamoring for it. But it is recommended only for public libraries and postsecondary academic institutions. Although the "Onion" has hooked many savvy high school readers, "Our Dumb World"'s strongly objectionable content (e.g., a manipulated image of George W. Bush performing a sexual act with a Saudi leader) negates its appeal for school libraries. [See Prepub Alert, "LJ" 6/15/07.]Audrey Snowden, Cleveland P.L.

Copyright 2007 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.