Product Description

This work follows P.J. through a year of his life as he describes his fraught relationships with his wife, his assistant Max, his daughter, his editor, his teenage godson and the dreaded "Political Nut Who Lives Around Here". P.J. also takes on the state of the Third World, the 2000 election debacle, the Clinton scandals, political correctness, the dot-com bubble and everything else a polite family doesn't talk about in the living room - including sex, politics, money, and religion.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1231698 in Books
• Published on: 2001-09-25
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 276 pages

Customer Reviews

Fantastic
Another 5 star laugh-out-loud topical book from O'Rourke, buy it now!! Informative, opinionated, funny and perceptive - everything we expect from PJ. I particularly liked reading the topics closer to home such as children, wives, mobile phones and best of all How to Be a Business Success by Managing Toddlers. Brilliant.

PJO in fine form at a location you may recognise
For those who don't know, PJO is a modern-day essayist and article writer for numerous American publications.
He is a Republican and probably reckons Attila the Hun was a bit soft but, has an extremely caustic wit and puts forward a (currently) unpopular view point fairly well.

In this current set of essays he stays pretty close to home and he covers the end of the Clinton administration, the 3rd way, wine tasting, driving, a who's who of young people for old farts and other topics.
I don't agree with everything he writes by any stretch, but he does make me think about things from another viewpoint (market economy good, pinko-liberal-commies bad) and makes me laugh even when I maybe aught to be offended. He knows better than to take himself entirely seriously which helps (a lot).

His other books are numerous - the best if which are (IMO)
All the Trouble in the World
Give War a Chance &
Age and Guile (beat youth innocence and a bad haircut)

For those of you who find analogies useful I'd place PJ O'Rourke between Bill Bryson (nicer/softer) and Hunter S Thomson (further out ----way out).

For those of you who may have recently read Michael Moores book 'Stupid White Men' this is the opposite view and as a consequence makes for provocative reading as a pair.

O'Rourke's drift
Nine books in, I have to say PJ is palling on me -- just when he seems to have been elevated to the comic prose pantheon.

This latest rambles over familiar Peej territory -- liberals, the Third World, the stock market, alcohol -- and to be fair, still packs a few good lines. But for this reader at least the abiding impression was of another rolling off the O'Rourke cookie cutter.