Rating: 
Summary: A thinking persons writer
Review: Not only is this collection of pieces he has written fun to read but O'Rourke is probably the only chauvinistic writer I utterly enjoy reading. I also appreciate that he dislikes GWB's stumbles as much as I do, which makes him damn fair when it comes to Republican leaning writers. And I laugh when he talks about how war for Americans and American kids is often the only way they learn geography. He isn't easy on the 'average' American which I applaud. He has a wonderful way of incorporating the 'dumbed down' American state of affairs into his first hand adventures. And if you get the chance to ever catch him speaking on C-Spans Booknotes you will not be disappointed and may well spend some hard earned dollars ordering the VHS tape of the show, if you are to lazy to record it. And I agree 100% with Amazon.com reviewer rexferal from Grand Junction, CO who notes ' Less bitter than Ann Coulter, far funnier than Al Franken, this is a book with an eye for the absurd that has chosen to laugh rather than to cry'. And as others have noted do a google.com search for his pieces in both Rolling Stone and The Atlantic publications.
Rating: 
Summary: Flashes of Brilliant Writing amid Endless Ironies
Review: Peace Kills is a collection of mostly previously published writing by P.J. O'Rourke as he looks at America's progression from a peace keeper under President Clinton to a democracy implanter under President Bush with an interlude as a target of terrorist violence in the United States.
Here are the sections:
Why Americans Hate Foreign Policy; Kosovo (November 1999); Israel (April 2001); 9/11 Diary; Egypt (December 2001); Nobel Sentiments; Washington, D.C. Demonstrations (April 2002); Thoughts on the Eve of War; Kuwait and Iraq (March and April 2003); and Postscript (Iwo Jima and the End of Modern Warfare).
The book is deeply skeptical about how well any human activity can succeed, whether its purpose is noble or not. Perhaps the most telling section is about ancient and modern Egypt in which Mr. O'Rourke postulates that people have always been crazy . . . with the pyramids as lasting evidence of that observation.
Most of the essays take an ironical cast. First, the official purpose of an activity is described. Second, a counter-example is presented to show the purpose is being undercut. Third, a segue-way occurs into a further irony relative to the counter-example. You have left shaking your head in wonder. These sections are most interesting when they provide local color that you didn't know before. I loved all of the examples from Egypt of the antiterrorist safeguards being ignored in favor of either religious observances or advancing tourism.
What makes the book special to me is the incredibly fine writing that shows up in each essay in explaining a complicated event and circumstance in terms of our American perspective. These are real gems and show careful rewriting. One yearns in vain for more of this type of writing in the essays . . . rather than having one more point, counter-point, segue-way example of irony.
If you already think that war doesn't make sense, you won't need this book to convince you.
But if you love fine, witty writing and don't mind slogging through too many ironic examples to find it, this book will reward you with ten or so remarkable paragraphs.
Rating:
Summary: Wickedly Funny
Review: War is hell - but sometimes peace is worse. P.J. O'Rourke's latest book is one of his best. You could shave with this wit. Humor is always funnier when it comes from a particular point of view. When he travels the world and reports on its trouble spots, O'Rourke strikes the pose of the kid in the back of the class making funny noises, but secretly he's the kid in the front row who has done all his homework. He knows his stuff which makes his it funnier and more insightful. Take this passage on how to tell the difference between piles of rubble in the war in Kosovo: "When the destruction was general, it was Serbian. Serbs surrounded Albanian villages and shelled them. When the destruction was specific, it was Albanian. Albaninas set fire to Serbian homes and businesses. And when the destruction was pointless - involving a bridge to nowhere, an empty oil storage tank, an evacuated Serb police headquarters and the like - it was NATO trying to fight a war without hurting anybody." O'Rourke is a former hippie turned Republican frat boy and his work has appeal across the political spectrum - regardless of how much he can't stand Hillary Clinton. Stuffed shirts, people who refuse to laugh because there's so much suffering in the world, people who don't like a good politically incorrect joke over drinks should stay a hundred miles from this book. Anyone who refuses to take the world seriously should ring up several.
Rating: 
Summary: Must all political satirists eventually become Art Buchwald?
Review: Well, no one can be on the cutting-edge forever, it seems. The notion of a conservative satirist is no longer the novelty it was twenty years ago. In this, his latest collection of magazine pieces, P. J.'s tank is running pretty low, sad to say. These articles are mostly travelogues, with some observational humor here and there that is rarely more than wry. There are plenty of good, pithy quotes and plenty of laughs, but no real guffaws to be had, no more spectacular leaping elbow drops from the top rope onto a hapless liberal meme. It's as if he's gotten tired of his I-used-to-be-a-hippie-now-I-smoke-cigars schtick. Or maybe the ascent of his imitators in talk radio has stolen his thunder. Or maybe the experience of moving from Rolling Stone to The Atlantic and working with the late and much lamented Michael Kelly gave him ill-advised ideas about doing serious reportage. Or maybe the times are just starting to pass him by. Satire, the old adage notwithstanding, does _not_ write itself.
Unlike previous collections, P. J. is content here to just slap the pieces together and stick a forward in front, rather than compose linking material for some ad-hoc meta theme. Which is fine with me; that device was only ever a fairly transparent hook, anyway. I didn't notice much stylistic revision this time around, either.
In recent interviews P. J. has tried to head off such criticism. He's in his fifties, he protests, how much immature squeezing-your-wingwang humor should he be expected to produce anymore? Fair enough. But it does seem as though he's getting tired of what he does, and hasn't yet found a new voice. This collection shows him vamping in the meantime.
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