Driving Like Crazy: Thirty Years of Vehicular Hell-bending, Celebrating America the Way It's Supposed To Be -- With an Oil Well in Every Backyard, a Cadillac ... of the Federal Reserve Mowing Our Lawn (Hardcover)

~ (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Humorist O'Rourke shifts gears, covering and combining past pieces on cars (for Automobile, Car and Driver, Esquire and Forbes) with new material to set this auto anthology in motion. Much has been reworked œbecause the writing—how to put this gently to myself—sucked. Starting with car journalism language (œDrop the bottle and grab the throttle), he steers the reader toward California cars: œMany automobiles were purchased to attract members of L.A.'s eight or ten opposite sexes. He writes about a variety of vehicles, from off-road racers to Philippine jeepneys (œa Willys cut in half and lengthened). Accelerating the humor, he updates his 1979 account of a 700-mile weekend trip through Michigan and Indiana: œI can imagine what the farm girls and small town teen angels who looked so longingly at the Harley-Davidson FXE-80 Super Glide would have thought if I had been riding a Segway: 'dork.'  His early essay œHow to Drive Fast on Drugs While Getting Your Wing-wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink is followed by wild road trips, NASCAR nights and selecting œa new grocery hauler, parent trap, Keds sled, family bus. Never in neutral, O'Rourke offers laughter on wheels. (June)
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From The Washington Post

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley P.J. O'Rourke opens this "collection of car journalism from 1977 to the present, a sort of social history with all the social science crap left out," with a hilarious piece that is making at least its third appearance in print: first, three decades ago, in National Lampoon; then, a decade later, in his book "Republican Party Reptile"; and now in "Driving Like Crazy." Tongue firmly in cheek (where it remains throughout much of this volume), O'Rourke calls it "an instructional tract," as its title makes abundantly clear: "How to Drive Fast on Drugs While Getting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink." Here's how it begins: "When it comes to taking chances, some people like to play poker or shoot dice; other people prefer to parachute jump, go rhino hunting, or climb ice floes, while still others engage in crime or marriage. But I like to get drunk and drive like a fool. Name me, if you can, a better feeling than the one you get when you're half a bottle of Chevis in the bag with a gram of coke up your nose and a teenage lovely pulling off her tube top in the next seat over while you're going a hundred miles an hour down a suburban side street. You'd have to watch the entire Iranian air force crash-land in a liquid petroleum gas storage facility to match this kind of thrill. If you ever have much more fun than that, you'll die of pure sensory overload, I'm here to tell you." That certainly should raise the hackles of those whom O'Rourke calls "the Fun-Suckers," people who "go around saying how unsafe this fun thing is and how unhealthy that fun thing is and how unfair, unjust, uncaring, insensitive, divisive, contagious, and fattening every thing that's fun is," but on the other hand it's likely to be music to the ears of anyone who once enjoyed a fling of irresponsible youth, even if only in the imagination. The piece was written when O'Rourke was "a twerp of thirty-one," and as for the girl in the tube top, "she didn't exist." Or, more accurately: "I mean, she existed. I saw her every day on the summer streets of New York. But she didn't see me. I was dweeby, Brooks Brothers-clad, and invisible to her ilk." Welcome, in other words, to P.J. Land, where the line between truth and fiction is as invisible as the author himself was to that teenaged vision, and as impossible to pin down. When O'Rourke is on his game, he's as funny a writer as we have now, and even though many of the tales with which he regales us are certifiable stretchers, what matters is that they're funny, not whether they're true. If they really were true, O'Rourke would have been dead at least a quarter-century ago, yet here he is now, at the astonishing age of 62, purring along a lot more smoothly than those Buicks of yore about which he writes with more or less equal measures of affection and exasperation, being "a Buick brat, born that way, no choice in the matter since my dad sold them for a living." In these dozen-and-a-half pieces about cars, as in just about everything else he's written, O'Rourke is an unabashed America Firster: not in the pre-World War II isolationist sense, but in his belief that the Golden Age of the American car, from the end of the war until the early 1960s, was also the high moment of world automotive history. For that matter, he believes that just about everything American is better than just about anything else, with at least two apparent exceptions: the 1990 Porsche 911 that he drives and "my wife's car -- a 1989 3-series BMW convertible that's as taut and firm as my wife." He looks back fondly on "the fervor of automotive brand loyalty" that raged when he was a boy and reflects sadly on today's deprived youth: "I am trying to imagine how I could explain, to someone born in 1999, the fine shade of difference between owning an Oldsmobile and owning a Buick." Not to mention owning a Pontiac, which is what my parents were driving when I got my license in 1954, and which I soon parked in a tree trunk. Speaking of all things American, not to mention All American, O'Rourke is very high on American schlock. Not for him "the beaten track of beauty, intellect, and bon ton"; instead he goes for "Piggly-Wiggly stores, Taco Bells, 7-Elevens, Col. Sanders Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets, and the various important architectural periods of gas stations: early enameled steel Bauhaus, classic 'free-drinking glass' International style, and self-serve postmodern." As he says: "This is America, and that's freedom for you -- freedom to make everything look like [expletive] perhaps, but freedom nonetheless. Are we going to bulldoze every Kmart and create a federal agency to design something in its place? That was how East Berlin became the charming place it was. Dairy Queens, water slides, flea markets, Cinema 1 2 3 4 5 6s, they are our family. They may be ugly and embarrassing, but we wouldn't be here without them. And that's why Americans just love this stuff." Well, maybe so and maybe not. I'm as disinclined to read Deep Meaning into the architecture of the strip mall as O'Rourke himself is disinclined to read it into cars. O'Rourke is a self-described "car nut," but he's not into car deconstruction or car theory. "It would be a violation of car nut logic to talk about what cars mean," he writes, and adds with perfect common sense: "They mean I don't have to walk home." And: "The car is a cultural marker within a patriarchal construct. The car must be understood to embody both a socio-economic text and a political metatext. And if you believe that, somebody should back over you with a car." Perhaps that could be accomplished in the O'Rourke garage, where apparently there are enough vehicles to form a NASCAR team. The once-rebellious youth is now a father of three, and his automotive expectations have changed accordingly. "What Americans with children want," he now knows, "is something that can be run through the car wash with the windows open (and maybe with the urchins left inside). . . . What a family needs in a brat buggy is a thing that has voluminous interior space and modest exterior dimensions, that's car-like when a car's required and truckish when there's trucking to be done, that's good on slippery surfaces (including the garage floor with upchuck and fanny rash cream on it), and that doesn't cost as much as the majority interest in Procter & Gamble, manufacturer of Pampers, that I seem to have bought." Oh how the mighty have fallen. No more treks for O'Rourke through Baja California, India, the Philippines and Kyrgyzstan (all described herein), for now he's a Soccer Dad, behind the wheel of a minivan. Now he dreams not of tube tops but of Pampers. Sic transit gloria mundi.
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press (June 9, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802118836
• ISBN-13: 978-0802118837
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (26 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #6,269 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

36 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This is a return to Quintessential PJ O'Rourke, April 15, 2009

By	Jennifer G. Ellis "jge" (Monticello, ME USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Having read all of the author's previous books (I think), I am thrilled to find he's back in his element with DRIVING LIKE CRAZY. This book I could not put down, and with every page turn found myself either laughing out loud or muttering some form of "YESSSS !."

I haven't had this much fun since reaing his "ALL THE TROUBLE IN THE WORLD".


P.J. O'Rourke is a master of metaphore and his writing is a sheer pleasure to read. He's what makes me feel good about this country.
I can't wait until he writes his next one. I can't imagine that anyone who has the ability to be intellectually honest cannot relate to most of what he says. It's class-A entertainment.

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Be careful where you read this - don't wake the sleeping, May 31, 2009

By	Jerry Saperstein (Evanston, IL USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)

If you share a bed with someone, do not bring this book into that bed when your bed mate is sleeping - otherwise you will either wake them with your laughing or choke yourself trying to stifle your laughter.

This is P. J O'Rourke at his funniest. These are reprints, for the most part, of articles O'Rourke wrote for various automotive columns - and every one is simply hilarious.

O'Rourke's adventures are a mixed bag. A drive from Florida to California in a 1956 Buick Special four-door turns into a series of unlikely events that are best read with nothing in your mouth - lest said contents be propelled out of your mouth in a burst of laughter as you come upon the next episode in an insane journey. O'Rourke gets up close and personal with NASCAR, which is not only funny, but interesting. I've never been a NASCAR fan, but O'Rourke has convinced me to at least try watching cars go in a circle at least once. A bunch of middle-aged car enthusiasts ride classic motorcycles across Michigan and a couple of other states. The title merely hints at the contents: "The Rolling Organ Donors Motorcycle Club".

Next is an account of the Baja 1000 road race. Only a masochist with a well honed sense of humor could turn this rolling disaster into something funny. But O'Rourke does - and convinces the reader that sane people do not take part in this race. The amount of effort that goes into preparing machines for this race is astounding - as is the number of things that can go wrong. The backup crew for this race team included two airplanes.

All of the eighteen stories are funny and you don't have to be a car lover to enjoy them, but it helps. One of the funniest stories is about O'Rourke, his wife and their three children taking a trip in a station wagon.

The cover photo of a young man sprawled across the hood of a 60s Mustang is explained in the book - but I'ml not going to give it away here.

All in all, just plain O'Rourkeian fun. Very little in the way of politics - and a lot about cars, motorcycles and trips gone wrong.

Jerry

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Lots of fun, May 7, 2009

By	Christopher C. Cole (Cincinnati, OH United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

P.J. O'Rourke is a great writer on many things, and this compilation of driving stories is one of his great efforts, even if you already read some of these before. He rivals the best of Hunter Thompson. Up to date and a great read.