P. J. O'Rourke Books

For those who are sick of left-wing comic/journalist types (Michael Moore, Al Franken etc etc) having the monopoly on political laughs, you'll find O'Rourke a great alternative. He's a conservative journalist who's also very funny. His views range from the comically/farcically cruel to the middle-of-the-road views so everyone will find something to both agree and disagree with.

In this book, he disects the US government, with an essay addressing each aspect. It's amazing how he makes facts and statistics about things like fiscal policy fascinating, humorous reading. And you'll learn something too. He talks about things that are rarely explored in mainstream media. If you've never read anything by him, this is a great book to start.

This is a great read. As usual O'Rouke's witty humour does not let you down as he explains the government. He takes a dry mudane subject and injects it with humor and insight while making it once agian cool to be conservative.

This book is a well compiled anthology of porbably the best Automotive writings anywhere. Try it! Also...if you like this you should read her monthly column in Automobile Magazine.

If you are of an autombile mind, then "Road Trips..." is a great book to read while in the coffee shop, waiting for the drawbridge to come down, or just to fill time. It is a collection of short stories from various authors, making it a collage of driving cultural tidbits that inform and entertain. The hardcover edition is nostalgical, appealing--a beautiful, classical cover with natural, thick pages--that made me want to head down to Route 66 from beginning to end, and hit every diner in between. I'm glad to be a part of the American Culture, and especially the driving culuture, as peoples past could not have imagined--nor enjoyed--the thrill at travelling at a mile a minute as easily as putting on your clothes. "Road Trips..." is a journey in itself, and I dare not spoil the trip for you. Lindamood did a fantastic editing job by keeping her hands out of the mix unless necessary; she let the writer do the talking. Great reading for all minds over 15 (language). Makes a great gift for the driver in your life.

PJ O'Rourkes books crack me up. But you still can learn from them. This book is a funny, but true, perspective on various economies. Not from a real scientific perspective, but rather "the Man on the Street".

Barring none, this is the place for a novice P.J. O'Rourke reader to start. He has been in a slight slump as of late, but he is at his peak here. I loaned my first copy to someone who never returned it. If I lose this copy, I would buy it again.

This is O'Rourke's essay on economics, in it he analyzes why some societies work economically and why some do not, regardless of geography or access to natural resources. It has often been said that to be funny you first have to be smart. Here O'Rourke demonstrates that he knows more than a little about free market economics. He posesses keen powers of observation and an even sharper wit. His innate intelligence comes through.

How much funnier would he be had he not burned out all those brain cells in the '60s? It's not likely he could be! This one is hard to top.

P.J. O'Rourke manages to dizzy his audience with a tautological series of stories, comparsions, and self-defacement and then nauseatingly spews empty paragraphs. Don't know what a tautology is? Read this book, you'll figure it out.

An author either takes pride in his ignorance or banks on his authority. O'Rourke attempts to do both, the former almost always shining through the latter. Coming away, you'll feel like you learned something. Of course you did! It just took him 10 angles, 5 anecdotes, and 8 less-than-appropriate similes to convey a Macro 101 principle. If you want a good laugh, read this book. If you want someone who knows what they're talking about, keep looking

I actually love O'Rourke's quips (even though I disagree with most of his theories and viewpoins), and I think the book is well worth buying if you ever write, or speak in public, about matters at all related to economics (including, say, making reports or giving presentations to management): go through the book with a highlighter and small sticky bookmarks and by the time you're through you'll have a hundred funny quips to enliven your next report or presentation (only pick a couple of them for each occasion, of course!-). But you won't learn much from this book -- whether you already know a lot about economics, or just about nothing; it's just too much of a "snapshot" of specific short periods of times in various places, observed very partially and reported with much more attention to being funny than to being accurate and useful.

Smug rich people and their propagandists don't make me laugh, no matter how cute they think they are.
Regarding why some countries are poor and others rich, it's not complicated. The rich nations have been imposing disastrous neoliberal economic policies upon the poor nations that concentrate wealth, destroy local economies, and decimate labor and environmental protections.
Generations of invasions and colonialism haven't helped matters either.
Moreover, those people who work for economic justice are often oppressed by the state forces the rich countries arm and train. For example, the U.S.-backed Colombian forces and paramilitaries kill a couple hundred union activists each year. Subtle Voices: Cries from Colombia and The Profits Of Extermination: How U.S. Corporate Power is Destroying Colombia

O'Rourke does what the rest of the corporatists do, they co-opt the brand "conservative" while they divert their audiences from the realities of geopolitics.
For some actual understanding of economics, I'd recommend When Corporations Rule the World andThe Corporation.

"The money hunger grows on what it feeds. So everyone is compelled to take part in the wild goose chase, and the hunger for possession gets an ever stronger hold of man. It becomes the most important part of life; every thought is on money, all the energies are bent on getting rich, and presently the thirst for wealth becomes a mania, a madness that possesses those who have and those who have not.
Existence has become an unreasoning, wild dance around the golden calf, a mad worship of God Mammon. In that dance and in that worship man has sacrificed all his finer qualities of heart and soul - kindness and justice, honor and manhood, compassion and sympathy with his fellowman. Each for himself and devil take the hindmost. Is it any wonder that in this mad money chase are developed the worst traits of man - greed, envy, hatred, and the basest passions? Man grows corrupt and evil; he becomes mean and unjust; he resorts to deceit, theft, and murder."
-Alexander Berkman

I give this three stars because the original version - which you should not only own, but should put in your will - is one of the very funniest things that has ever been committed to paper. I, like another reviewer, had expected a hardcover edition to be definitive, but instead, we get an edited cover, glossy, one-dimensional paper, and an endless parade of poorly copied photos and advertisements. Whoever did this reprint was obviously just trying to do a quick and dirty job so that they could scrape a little more meat from the bleached bones of the America's Finest Humor Magazine.

If this is the only copy you have access to (and have never seen the original), it is so funny that you may not see the problem. The jokes are still there, after all, and I can still laugh out loud while reading it.

But....for $2.50 in 1974, we were given a diamond. This latest version feels like cubic zirconium.

I'd often thought of buying the original version this book over the years, but the reviews preceding this one convinced me to go ahead and just do it. It sounds like the original is superior, but this does just fine for all the reasons people here have stated. I remember how divorced from reality people in my own high school were during the Seventies, and this nails the whole milieu.

I agree with Deborah from Olympia down below about the earlier reviewer who called this book "hilarious" and then explained why he hated it...ad infinitum, ad nauseum. The guy's own review was hilarious, and only gave me more reasons to buy the book.

The planets lined up when the editors of the National Lampoon Magazine decided to create this brilliant parody of a mid-1960s high school yearbook. The names they made up are still classic, the grainy b/w pix a masterpiece, and the banal but funny text lives on.

This edition may not be an exact duplicate of the beloved softcover edition we all knew, but it's really great anyway. Enjoy!

Let's state it simply -- this is perhaps the funniest book ever published, even though the year 1964 is getting more distant all the time. Ingenious in its construction (a multi-level reconstruction of a typical high school yearbook), it is a hilarious, scathing, understanding, and even sort of poignant look at the kids of one year, one generation, in America long ago. Absolutely brilliant! (If you can find it, NatLamp also did an amazingly detailed town newspaper parody in the late 1970's that is also great.)

First things first: I am an admitted P.J. O'Rourke buff (the dude inspired me to start writing, which is either a good thing or bad), so I was interested to check this out. Plus, after reading Tony Hendra's book about the Lampoon and the creation of the Yearbook by Doug Kenney and O'Rourke, I decided to quit putting off my hesitancy to buying it and purchased it about two months ago. I haven't laughed as hard at anything in print since.

The context of the Yearbook is essential to understanding it; rather than just a "hey, look how crazy we were!" sort of Porky's approach, there's an underlying theme of "Animal House"-style anger at the authority structures that made social conformity and Vietnam possible. The writers had lived through the Vietnam era of the late Sixties, and they looked back in anger at the controls high school placed on them. There's real venom in these pages, if you know where to look.

But what struck me, and what made me appreciate this on the terms of being a simply good artwork, was the similarities to high school yearbooks even today. Sure, the layouts and hair/fashion styles change, but the general idea is the same: there are the popular kids, and then there's everyone else (including the "hero" of the piece, future Delta member Larry Kroeger). They all exist in the mythical Dacron, Ohio, and their school is really everybody's school. I can say, coming from a similarly awful school here in the great state of South Carolina, that nothing made me chuckle more than the laugh of recognition. I graduated in '97, yet I could identify and pick up on things that would've been true of any year (the snarky tribute to a fallen classmate, the peppy rememberence of a fallen President, the losing sports teams buoyed by a sense of "better luck next year").

The yearbook is so spot on, when I went back to my senior year yearbook I could immediately see such parallels. Our football team was(still is) a walking disaster, and little good could be said for the other sports. Our school play was just as clumsy as Dacron's "Julius Caesar", and our talent shows didn't improve much on the 'entertainment' provided by the 1964 class. It was these hilarious occurances that made me appreciate the book as simply more than a rant against the complacency of the Fifties; it was at long last a genuinely funny ghost of what it mocked.

I can't vouch for whether the "new" material takes away from the old (as this was indeed my first run-in with the parody in total), but I will say it seems a bit tame compared to what's part of the original. Plus, the "literary magazine" struck a chord, as I can remember my own sophmoric contribution to a similar publication in my high school (which sold about one copy, I believe). The "where will they be in ten years" list seemed like it could've been written by the idiots in my class, and the crude names assigned to the underclassmen (shown with the same exact photo every time) would not have been out of place in my school's tome either.

Overall, I enjoyed this far more than I imagined I would. There are obvious sight gags (the basketball team's hapless conduct had me in stiches), but the real meat is in the writing (whether or not O'Rourke can really claim a majority of the material, it seems a bit arrogant to take top billing over the late Kenney), which is dead-on. No matter when you graduated, you will recognize the figures in this book. And you will laugh your ass off, even as you cry tears of recognition.

Most of the essays in this book are as funny and informative as most of O'Rourke's other works, and unlike "American Spectator's Enemies List", the book is well worth the cover price.

This book is somewhat of a mixed bag. Unlike some of his other works, this has no central theme, but is instead a motley collection of articles written over the years for various and sundry publications on subjects ranging from why he hates bicycles to chasing down a story in the Bahamas about the involvement of high government officials in the drug trade. A few are real clunkers, such as a fictionalized account of his family life back in Ohio, titled "The King of Sandusky" or an over the top piece called "Just one of those days" in which he portrays an executive whose daily routine includes gunfights with his neighbors, raping his secretary and setting off bombs on the subway in order to get to work on time (so his boss won't have him shot). Most are OK, like the aforementioned bicycle piece, which he wrote for "Car & Driver" magazine back in the mid 80's. It was funny at the time, lampooning bicycling just about the time it was becoming trendy, especially with the eco-weenie set. In fact, this article brought howls of protest in the form of letters in the following issue, thus basically making his point appear all the more valid, namely, that too many bike nuts at the time suffered from an acute overdose of self righteousness accompanied by a chronic lack of a sense of humor. Like I said, it was funny at the time, but now seems rather dated.

Still, this entire effort was greatly redeemed by a few pieces that were absolutely spot on. One was "Ship of Fools" in which our intrepid reporter signed up for a cruise ship tour on the Volga in the USSR, based on an ad he'd read in "The Nation" magazine. He joins up with myriad groups of American leftists whose desire to see Soviet life in the best possible light overwhelms any qualities of observation or common sense they might happen to possess. These unfortunates are the targets of PJ's satire at its absolute best as he rips into them repeatedly for their blatant toadying on behalf of the Soviet system. Rarely has the banality of evil been described with such zest.

But even this pales in comparison to the book's crown jewel, namely a short article entitled simply "Ferrari refutes the Decline of The West". It is, on one level, a great road trip story, in which he and his boss drive from New York to LA in a brand new Ferrari 308GTS at speeds as high as 140 mph. Anyone who's ever lusted after exotic sports cars, or fantasized about driving on public roads at double or even triple the speed limit will love it on a purely visceral level, but that's only part of the pleasure, since PJ uses this drive as a metaphor for what makes Western Civilization, and America specifically, great. PJ describes an encounter with a black salesman in a Cadillac on the top of Hoover Dam in which the latter, after hearing their account of blazing through Arizona and New Mexico, looks at the Ferrari and says, simply, "Goddam, that's BEAUTIFUL!" PJ states, after finally turning over the car to a Hollywood studio "It was a glow that wouldn't fade. And I still felt good when I flipped the keys to the receptionist ...... And in fact I still feel good today." So will you after reading it, it is, in fact, worth the price of the entire book.

So far, I've had the pleasure of being an O'Rourke reader for this one and Parliament of Whores (more will no doubt follow). Republican Party Reptile isn't as good if you appreciate PJ for the way he does a detailed analysis which is still funny and controversial - as Parliament was a very organised, topical book. This one is a bit too much of a random knapsack for that.

That still makes it a great book as his pieces will drive home his views on drugs, politics, cars, drugs, international relations, teenaged girls, crime and fast cars. My favourites were Ship of Fools (a bunch of lefties and peaceniks cruise the Volga in the USSR during the Cold War, PJ is with them), Ferrari Refutes Decline of the West (PJ and boss get to deliver a Ferrari from NY to LA over several days of high speed cross country), Holiwood Etiquette (a great take on the neurosis etc) and How to Drive Fast on Drugs While Getting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink (self explanatory I trust!)

So if you want to acquaint yourself with an earlier, more personal PJ, this book is good.

P.J. O'Rourke is what a Republican used to be about--the party of Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt. Small government and small industry. Trusting people to take care of themselves without a hovering nanny looking after them. This book serves as a position piece for a party that has been hijacked by forces alien to its foundation. And it's pretty damned funny besides.

It's dated, though. Written a good twenty years ago, it addresses such issues as poverty in Marcos's Philippenes and a constitutional crisis in the Turks and Caicos islands. This isn't exactly front-page material any longer. We get an overview of O'Rourke's beliefs and the source of them, but one wonders what you'd get out of them today.

Sadly, the author isn't as eloquent anymore, nor is he as politically inclusive. He's lapsed into a sad neo-conservative agenda that seems almost antithetical to the contents of this book. But at least, between these covers, we still have the writings of a man who boldly said what he meant and meant what he said. And I'll bet he'll sell you on it too.

P. J. O'Rourke is an incredibly funny writer and incisive commentator on the contemporart scene. This collection of essays, while from a libertarian point of view, should be found enjoyable by all readers. In this book he skewers the Safety Nazis, pro-Soviet visitors to the USSR, the New York Review of Books, horrible Protestant hats, cocaine pirates, and other odd ducks in flight. P.J. O'Rourke is one of the funniest writers around, and I also recommend his PARLIAMENT OF WHORES and GIVE WAR A CHANCE.

I had the original and lost it. It is a work of pure genius!
I love it.It looks so much like my yearbook. And the characters are fabulous.

It is almost as good as the old one that I lost. I think I have grown up a bit (I hope) since then so some of the humor has lost a little of its edge. The printing quality on the new one was not as good as the original. On some pages it almost appeared that they had photocopied the original to make the new one. I still think maybe the best part is the list of names of all the underclassmen. To come up with those dozens of puns the writers must have stayed up late smoking lots of good stuff.

I remember my roommate having the National Lampoon yearbook parody back when I was in college in the 70's, and laughing so hard I couldn't stand up. I always had it in the back of my mind over the years to back-order a copy, if one still existed, but never could find it. Ecstatic to find a re-issue. The humor in magazines like this can often seem dated years later, but not in this case. Completely side-splitting from cover to cover. Especially ground-breaking considering when it was originally published.

When this first came out, it was an amazing success.

First great conceit: printing the whole thing upside down. The "front cover" is the only page that faces the way it does; all the rest of the piece relates the back cover as the front, which is a beautifully done leatherette high school yearbook cover.

And then there's the content. It's all here - the clubs, the class clowns, the juvenile delinquents, the jocks, the cheerleaders. No one has ever topped the orginiality and satirical edge that the editors lovingly contributed to the piece.

I do agree that this reproduction is not as good as the original. I actually have an original and yes, it looks a lot better than this. But look past the print quality and enjoy the content. It's no less brilliant now than it was when it first came out in 1974.

I don't know why they changed the cover page by dropping in the yellow banner across the cheerleaders bare butt. The original was full on. Not that thats the big deal here, but that IS the first thing I noticed when this was released. The original was superior in quality. This repo takes a bit of eye squinting in places to see the details. And if you're anyone who was and is a Lampoon reader, you know thats what its all about. Its not a comic book. Crap, it took a month just to read (and often reread) and get through just the monthly magazines. The book releases were like making your way through a full length novel. Thats just they way you attacked a Lampoon. Almost like it was homework, but fun homework. If anymore of these reproductions come out, I hope the publishers will opt out of using a cheap copy machine and enter the digital age to re-create the final product. Lampoons were labors of love by its creators and writers. The 21st century versions should be given the same treatment.

Appropriate dress and which type of wine to drink with chicken is something that baffles those of us who aren't privy to actually having somewhere to go that we need to be dressed appropriately for. I found this book extremely enjoyable for a fun read that doesn't require too much thought. I especially enjoyed the sections on "The Horrible Wedding" and "Travel Etiquette". It is possible to jump around the book and read at your lesiure which makes it an ideal book to read while waiting in lines or driving. Maybe Modern Manners II will tackle that subject.

The audio version of this book is way over the top. When the reader reads dry humor in such a flowery way he makes the author sound snotty. I couldn't bear it. Its hard to say if I would have liked it better if the reader had toned it down.

If, like me, you read P.J. and enjoy his wit even though you frequently find yourself disagreeing with him politically, there is a great deal of material in this book that you will find very funny. However, if like me, you occasionally find that he goes too far and simply becomes insulting without bothering to be witty, you will find a great deal in this book annoying and unfunny. In this, it is not unlike "Republican Party Reptile", although it's not quite as funny and a bit more irritating. In quality, it's about on a par with "Bachelor Home Companion", although that book was less political and thus less annoying when it failed to be funny. As such, it's nowhere near as good as his best work: "Parliament of Whores", "Eat The Rich", "Holidays In Hell", and "Give War A Chance", in (more or less) order from best down, but it's miles ahead of his worst books, "The Enemies List", "Modern Manners", and "Age And Guile...", in order from worst up.

If you actually enjoy P.J. unconditionally and agree with his politics more than I do, you may well find this book more enjoyable than I did. I'd still say that it's a mid-range effort when compared to his other works.

I agree with some of the negative comments of others who comment on the book, that it's not his best, but there are still enough observations and turns of phrase that make you laugh out loud, to make it worth reading. I'm on the last 60 pages, now.

The books of P. J. O'Rourke can be divided into three classifications. First come single-topic books, such as Modern Manners or The Bachelor Home Companion, which are (or give the appearance of being) single, unified works. Second are the collections of random essays on unrelated topics, such as Republican Party Reptile. Third are the essay collections whose individual pieces all fall under some general unifying topic, such as All the Trouble in the World or Parliament of Whores. Then there's The CEO of the Sofa, which either exists in a category of its own, or occupies a stitched-together amalgam of two or more of the preceding. Other reviewers have already cautioned the newcomer to O'Rourke's writing not to begin with this book. Heed them. If you've never sampled O'Rourke's style before, it's as likely as not that you'll be utterly at a loss if you begin here.

The CEO of the Sofa is a collection of essays with a unique conceit (unique to O'Rourke, at least, as he openly admits having swiped the idea from a collection of columns by Oliver Wendell Holmes): each is purportedly one of a series of conversations around the house with family members, friends, his personal assistant, and some imaginary neighbors. This is used as a means of linking, however tenuously, a series of essays that would otherwise have little to do with one another. The essays themselves are essentially unchanged from their various prior publications, and often the only reminder that a particular piece is supposed to be part of a dialogue is the occasional (sometimes jarring) insertion of the other party's name. Like most experiments, this one is not entirely successful, although only the pedant will allow it to detract from essays that he or she would otherwise enjoy.

The book's contents themselves are essentially what one has come to expect from P. J. O'Rourke; vaguely libertarian, mostly hilarious musings on a variety of subjects. In this case they include Hillary Clinton, the 2000 presidential election, the current (or then-current) crop of celebrities, and anything else he happens to cast his critical eye upon. His style is unchanged; he can still zero in on the dumbest-sounding passage in a book or speech and gleefully quote it, he is still adept at pointing out hypocrisy and contradiction, and he is still capable of generating hilariously descriptive similes about ninety percent of the time (likewise, about one simile in ten is a groan-inducing dud that thuds to the ground and dies; my biggest general criticism of O'Rourke, a writer whom I treasure, is that he is slightly too much in love with his narrative voice to effectively edit out the clunkers).

If you are an aficionado of O'Rourke, you will like this book, or should. It is never boring. If you haven't sampled his writing before, my admiration for the man demands that I warn you away from this one, at least for the time being. By all means you should give him a shot, but you would be best served by starting with something earlier, such as Parliament of Whores (one of the best nonfiction books on American government, period, and nicely evenhanded in criticizing the entire government, thus satisfying readers of numerous political stripes). Then come back to The CEO of the Sofa with your sense of humor properly honed, and enjoy.

I love political satire and humor,both left and right wing.I can't believe it;but this is the first book of PD's that I've read.I know he is a popular writer,his books are everywhere;but for some reason I've passed them up.I guess I just wrote them off as popular fiction.I've got nobody to blame but myself ,but now that I've found him,I'll be reading more.
A lot of writers of political satire confuse hatred, foul language and outright nastiness with humor.Not so with PD.He takes the ordinary things that go on all the time and comes up with off-the- wall thinking and makes very different and truly humorous comments and observations.His approach is reminiscent of Twain and more recently Mark Russell.He had my sides splitting without resorting to mean spirited character assissination.His humor is more like the type of thing you get on "Roasts".
He amazed me time and tme again,by pointing out great humor where I had not even realized it existed.
If you like one-liners the book is littered with them.
Here is a little bit of the sort of thing he gives us:
"NABAA--The National Association to Ban Almost Everything"
"Clinton's popularity ratings are getting so high he's starting
to date again."
"If I had a cell phone, I'd lose it.I lose everything,I left my
first wife in the back of a cab somewhere."
"The only thing the UN is suited for,according to its charter,
is an invasion from Mars."
"The Web is just a device by which bad ideas travel around the
world at the speed of light."
"NAPWETD--National Association of People ith Not Enough to Do."
"Ideas are to Hillary,what sex is to her husband."
"Since the time of Jimmy Carter,Liberals have been chasing
their tail,and,last heard,they've caught it and begun eating
and had chewed their way up to the back of their own ears."
"The computer becomes the handgun of modern mugging."
"This spawned a multitudinous generation of white-collar
criminals who can't even be bothered with the collar."
"Kids today may be wizards with virtual reality,yet they seem
a little foggy about what makes reality virtuous.

He does some great takes on a book "Guidelines for Bias-Free Writing",obviously from the left:
"Sure,the task force seems to be nothing but a rat bag of
shoddy pedagogues,athletes of the tongue,professional pick-
nits filling the stupid hours of their pointless days with
nagging the yellow-bellied editors of university presses,
which print volume after volume of bound-wad fated to sit
unread in college library stacks until the sun expires.
"Why doesn't the task force just combine "she" and "it" and
pronounce the thing accordingly."
If you've ever read Hunter S. Thompson's "Fear and Loathing in
Las Vegas", or seen the movie,and wondered what it was all
about;PJ explains it all for you.
"A thrilling saga in which nothing much happens--a fitting
example of the picaresque for the Now Generation.One of the
things Hunter did in this book was write a coda to,an obituary
for,the nonsense of the 1960's.It is important to recall that
in the 1960's nothing much happened."
So,you can see,nothing in off-limits to PJ'sharp satire.
He keeps CEO's,the Stock Markets,technology,Drugs,Gun Control,
Political Correctness,Europe,India and particularly,the Liberal
Elite directly in his gun sites and fires back with some of
the best ammunition available---HUMOR!
This book has made me a P.D. James fan.
Oh yeah,my title is a quote from page 103;guess who he was
talking about.

Saying you understand Smith's capitalism by citing Wealth of Nations is about as bad as saying you understand Marxism by citing the Communist Manifesto.

Smith wrote other things, too, and so should O'Rourke. He's funny; he's just not exactly going about this the right way.

PJ O'Rourke's usual sarcasm is veiled by his outright admiration for Adam Smith's massive achievement. The book reads much more like a serious treatise on Smith's work than his usual humorour romp through the mores of our our time. O'ROurke has always been a keen observer of our times and proves that he is a keen observer of the past as well as Smith's many lessons for the present. Still entertaining, just more instructive than usual.

More a why and who on Adam Smith than the nuts & bolts of an extremely difficult book. P.J.O'Rourke is right about how many of us, required by econ professors, have "read 'in' the book", but not read it cover to cover. And he explains why in side splitting detail.
Where P.J.O'Rourke excelled is in framing Smith's arguments in humorous common sense everyday settings.
By the end of the book I not only gained an understanding of Smith's approach to economics, but a genuine admiration of the man.

But, if you are looking for a cliff notes version to get you through a class, you've missed the whole point.

The surfeit of reviews complaining about the author's insights and accuracy in summarizing "Wealth Of Nations" has finally spurred me to post my own review, which I'll also crib, right up front:

It's jokes, people! Jokes from a guy you know is libertarian! It's not Cliff's Notes!

If you have a conservative slant to your politics, you'll love the jokes about how fruitless central economic planning, government-run corporation and labor unions prove.

If you have a liberal slant to your politics, you'll love the jokes that point out how dumb it is for governments to try to control people's behaviors, when simple selfishness will generally do the trick.

But whatever your slant, if you have a term paper due on Adam Smith, don't use this as source! "Wealth of Nations" was huge. Its thoughts draw directly from other huge books Smith wrote, which you must also read to fully understand the man (which O'Rourke freely admits in the book, repeatedly).

Nothing in this book is erected to portray it as an authoritative summary of "Wealth." The author and publisher clearly tell you that, again, it's jokes, people: jokes from someone who is well-known as acerbic, contrary and cranky; jokes from someone whose political viewpoint cannot be more readily exposed.

If you don't like free markets, fine. If you hate "conservatives," fine. If you hold 120 postgraduate degrees in economics and the Adam Smith Distinguished Chair In Annoying Minutiae at Ivy League University, fine.

That doesn't change the fact that your reviews bemoaning the accuracy of this book or the interpretations of the author are sophisms, because, again:

It's jokes, people! Jokes from a guy you know is libertarian! It's not Cliff's Notes!

You don't have to read P. J. O'Rourke's On The Wealth of Nations because you already know the contents--a libertarian rant from a neocon wiseacre. But, seriously, folks, you shouldn't read it because it misrepresents Adam Smith and misleads readers. Fortunately, most of the book's flaws can be traced to one cheap trick at the very outset.

In the second sentence, O'Rourke transforms Smith's economic principles--the pursuit of self-interest, the division of labor and free trade--into "practical truths" (never defined), timeless and universal. Elevating them out of history is what enables O'Rourke to wield them as slogans in bludgeoning his usual bugbears--politicians, liberals, reporters et al.

One example--his treatment of the "pursuit of self-interest'--suffices to illustrate this systemic problem. First, the "self" to which Smith referred was a new phenomenon. Of course, some form of self is intrinsic to being human: the human mind is aware of itself. What emerged in the 17th century and flowered in the next, however, was the self as a legitimate social agent. Rather than address the appearance of individuality, autonomy and personal fulfillment, O'Rourke assumes it was there all along, had been repressed and was now unleashed, and moves quickly to one of his many ahistorical platitudes. In this case "...[S]elf-interest makes the world go round...since the world began going around--a little secret everyone knows."

Almost as important, Smith did not champion just any definition of self-interest but a Franklin-esque version that emphasized emotional control and rational calculation, that stood in sharp contrast to the unruly passions of aristocratic traditions and that would in theory produce certain social virtues. Either ignorant of or ignoring the historical context and its content, O'Rourke just rushes about waving the banner of "natural liberty" (never defined)--the "practical truth" that corresponds to the pursuit of self interest.

He uses the same sleight of hand with Smith's two other principles--the division of labor and free trade.

No one expects logic from comics. Hyperbole and jarring juxtaposition are their stock in trade, and at these O'Rourke's book excels. But as a guide to the seminal work of an 18th century political economist for literate 21st century readers, this book is an insult to both.

I am a huge P.J. O'Rourke fan... his wit and level of penmanship stand him above his peers. However, unless you enjoy reading one hundred pages of names with the occasional cutting remark, I would skip this one. Of all his books, this is the only one I am not wildly enthusiastic about.

These side-splitting lists were first published in the late '80's and early '90's. Since then, thanks to the Clinton administration the enemies of freedom and democracy have multiplied like mosquitos. P.J., get back to work, please.

The American Spectator is sadly gone now (what's left of it is called the American Prowler), a victim of its own overzealous pursuit of President Clinton and its
dalliance with the loathsome David Brock. But many of the best writers on the Right once wrote in its pages, among them P. J. O'Rourke. Mr. O'Rourke is one of
those writers who entertains us often enough that he can be forgiven for cashing in once in awhile, which is fortunate, because this is only barely a book. It starts with
a very funny column, A Call for a New McCarthyism (American Spectator, July 1989), in which he calls for a new blacklist. Unlike the McCarthy era list though :
"The distinguishing feature of this cluster of dunces is not subversion but silliness." And rather than barring these dunces from working and trying to hush up their
views, he has the more diabolical idea of exposing them and their ideas to the harsh light of day :

[T]he worst punishment for dupes, pink-wieners, and dialectical immaterialists might be a kind of reverse blacklist. We don't prevent them
from writing, speaking, performing, and otherwise being their usual nuisance selves. Instead, we hang on their every word, beg them
to work, drag them onto all available TV and radio chat shows, and write hundreds of fawning newspaper and magazine articles about their
wonderful swellness. In other words, we subject them to the monstrous, gross, and irreversible late-twentieth-century phenomenon of Media
Overexposure so that a surfeited public rebels in disgust. This is the 'Pia Zadora Treatment,' and, for condemning people to obscurity, it beats
the Smith Act hollow.

That's pretty funny stuff, but then you read the list and realize that almost all of the folks on it--Gore Vidal, Tom Hayden, Angela Davis, Amy Carter, Susan
Sarandon, Mike Farrell, Tikkun, Garry Trudeau, the Sheen brothers, etc.--faded into obscurity on their own; they were so awful they weren't even worthy enemies.
Unfortunately though, this initial essay was followed by six more installments (the last in November 1993) and some of these consist of nothing more than
nominations from readers and Mr. O'Rourke's comments on their nominations. It all gets pretty tiresome.

But then just as you're ready to toss the book on the trash heap, it's redeemed by two final pieces that were seemingly tacked on at the end just to flesh the book out to
150 pages. The first, 100 Reasons Jimmy Carter Was a Better President Than Bill Clinton (American Spectator, September 1993), is very funny. The second, Why I
Am a Conservative in the First Place (Rolling Stone, July 13-27, 1995), is not only amusing but also presents as good a defense of conservatism as you'll find
anywhere these days. In light of its title and the gist of the piece, it almost has to be read as a response to F. A. Hayek's famous libertarian essay, Why I Am Not a
Conservative. Hayek, who seems to have understand American conservatism not at all, wrote :

Let me now state what seems to me the decisive objection to any conservatism which deserves to be called such. It is that by its very nature
it cannot offer an alternative to the direction in which we are moving. It may succeed by its resistance to current tendencies in slowing down
undesirable developments, but, since it does not indicate another direction, it cannot prevent their continuance. It has, for this reason, invariably
been the fate of conservatism to be dragged along a path not of its own choosing. The tug of war between conservatives and progressives
can only affect the speed, not the direction, of contemporary developments. But, though there is a need for a "brake on the vehicle of progress,"
I personally cannot be content with simply helping to apply the brake. What the liberal must ask, first of all, is not how fast or how far
we should move, but where we should move. In fact, he differs much more from the collectivist radical of today than does the conservative.
While the last generally holds merely a mild and moderate version of the prejudices of his time, the liberal today must more positively oppose
some of the basic conceptions which most conservatives share with the socialists.

Mr. O'Rourke on the other hand, though often characterized as a libertarian, accepts the conservative label and his definition of conservatism :

The purpose of conservative politics is to defend the liberty of the individual and--lest individualism run riot--insist upon individual responsibility.

contains the all important corollary to liberty, that the price of our freedom must be that we each take responsibility for ourselves. Libertarianism's major fault is
that it insists on the former but refuses the latter.

On balance, the first and then the last two pieces make the collection marginally worthwhile. And Mr. O'Rourke does have to earn a living, so we'll not begrudge
too much the filler in between.

GRADE : B-

Pj is the Master of political insight! Here the readers help out too. Viva the new Red Scare! The most appropriate book for these schrill times.

This is, frankly, a terrible book. I'm a conservative, but I didn't find O'Rourke funny, clever, or insightful in the slightest. This book is exactly what it claims to be: a list. It is a sequence of long, boring lists of names, many of long-forgotten figures and celebrities. Explanations for the choices are rare, and superficial.

The essay about Carter at the end is mildly amusing, if trite. The "why I am conservative" is slightly better, but nothing most conservatives haven't already heard a thousand times before, in a more articulate manner.

I've never read O'Rourke before this. They say his other work is better. I certainly hope so.