And you thought a trip down the New Jersey Turnpike was scary….Tony Wheeler, founder of the Lonely Planet travel series, has more balls than you or I. Over the course of just a few years, he made pilgrimages to most every country that has, in the past 20 years, threatened the United States in some way, real or imaginary. The resulting book, Lonely Planet: A Tourist on the Axis of Evil, acts as a short list for enemies of democracy: Afghanistan, Albania, Burma, Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea and Saudi Arabia.

Wheeler writes with a first person wit foreign to most travel books and along the way takes into account each country’s position on things like human rights, terrorism and international diplomacy in hopes of figuring out what makes a country truly evil, or if such a thing can even be quantified.

Wheeler discusses the writing of Axis of Evil with Liane Hansen in an NPR interview that you may listen to here.