Our Dumb World: The Onion Atlas of the Planet Earth, 73rd Edition

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 Opportunism”) to Greenland (“The Largest Land Mass on Earth”) to “The Who Cares Islands”—this handsome parody is visually indistinguishable from genuine reference materials, but with jokes crammed into every inch, from topographical maps (“Largest Mayan Casino in Mexico”) and tiny vital statistics boxes (Syria's ethnicity: “Anti-Semitic Semites”) to historic timelines (Ireland, 1387: “Luck of the Irish runs out”) and photo captions (“Emergency shipments of food, water, and Bono reach Sudan”). 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. (Oct.)