Customer Reviews

Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence, and a Bad Haircut: Twenty-Five Years of P.J. O'Rourke

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Much of P.J. O'Rourke's self-deprecating humor is funny, down-to-earth and insightful. But beware - when he writes in this manner he is joking on the level. So when you read the introduction to Age and Guile and see how low of an opinion he has of the material published in this book, TAKE HIS WORD FOR IT - THIS ISN'T VERY GOOD MATERIAL. If you're considering buying this book because you enjoyed P.J.'s other works, re-consider. This material earns at most an occasional, light chuckle and more frequently induces sleep. Some of P.J.'s other works, particularly Holidays in Hell, elicited much more appropriate reactions from this reader for a book with the word "humor" printed on the back cover. Several of P.J.'s travel essays from that book can be expected to cause the kind of painful laughter that makes it difficult to breathe, see or even stand, and in some readers will even cause loss of bladder control. So if you haven't read Holidays in Hell, then I recommend you buy that book instead of this one. Unless you're having trouble sleeping.

The former editor of the Rolling Stone uses humor to make political commentary. He goes through much of his writing from high school and college, then on into his career as a writer and editor. He looks back at his naivete' regarding the political scene and arrives at a middle age where he now has common sense (like so many of us)!
This is a book that the Progressive Elites running our government into the ground need to read!

This is an excellent anthology of O'Rourke's writings from his commie journalist days in Baltimore in the early 1970s, through his years at NATIONAL LAMPOON, up to the mid-90s when he was writing articles about politics, current events and foreign affairs for ROLLING STONE and the conservative AMERICAN SPECTATOR. Included are articles about cars the he wrote for CAR & DRIVER, articles about fishing and hunting originally published in MEN'S JOURNAL, and a speech he gave at a CATO Institute function.

The essays vary greatly not just with regards to topics, but also with respect to the degree of humour, and some border on the serious. But all are interesting, as any P.J. O'Rourke fan would expect.

As O'Rourke states in the Introduction: "It is, I guess, interesting to watch the leftist grub weaving itself into the pupa of satire and then emerging a resplendent conservative blowfly."