Rating: 
Summary: Will you like it? Take this quick half-paragraph test.
Review: It's easy to find out if you'll like this book. Read the following half paragraph from the end of chapter one:
"But as frightening as terrorism is, it's the weapon of losers. When someone detonates a suicide bomb, that person does not have career prospects. And no matter how horrific the terrorist attack, it's conducted by losers. Winners don't need to hijack airplanes. Winners have an air force."
If you think that's funny and on target, you'll like the book. If you fail to see the humor, or think he's off in the weeds on his opinions, try something else.
I've been reading P.J. since his early National Lampoon days, and I think this is as funny as anything he's done in a long time. It's certainly better than his last two efforts ("Eat the Rich" and "CEO of the Sofa"). It's more comparable to "Give War a Chance". I'm glad to see him regaining his edge.
Rating: 
Summary: He seems blissful in his ignorance
Review: Mr. O'Rourke seems to have fallen into the same pitfall that has beset so many of his contemporaries and predecessors - he has begun to take himself seriously and even to believe that he knows what he is talking about. He has descended from the level of jaundiced, impartial observer to that of "pundit."
I detect more than a little thinly disguised pro-Israel, anti-Arab bias in some of his writings in this book. One example from page 107:
"But either way, the reality was that it had been almost thirty years since the last war between Egypt and Israel. Americans in my parents' generation were pretty mad at the Japs. They got over it. And by the 1970s they were driving Datsuns."
But how would the Americans have felt in the 1970s if the Japs were still occupying American land, expropriating American land on which to build settlements and branding any American who resisted a "terrorist?"
O'Rourke visits Israel, but doesn't seem to notice the daily sufferings of the Palestinians in the occupied territories. A lot more Egyptians remember the British-French-Israeli invasion of 1956 than do most ignorant Americans. And the Egyptians KNOW and remember who attacked who first in 1967.
In another place in his book, he even has Iraq invading Israel in 1967 and 1973. Casual ignorance or complicit myth-spinning? I don't know.
He used to be better.
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: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: Another fine mess
Review: You probably either love or hate P.J. O'Rourke. From the ranting Marxist maniac of thirty years ago to the libertarian leaning Republican of today, he has been consistently funny. This book covers 9/11 through the early stages of the war in Iraq. O'Rourke is something of a gonzo journalist in the Hunter S. Thompson tradition in that the story is his adventures in getting the story. The fault is not as grievous with O'Rourke, however, in that he is both far less pretentious and far funnier. (He mentions the personal effect of 9/11 on him of driving his prior book off the medium well sellers list, for example.) We travel with O'Rourke as he watches the well intentioned fail to bring order out of chaos while delivering free food to the semi-starving, while he dickers up the cost of buying what he thinks is alcoholic beer in dry Iraq, and while he visits Holy Land, or is it the holely land? There are certain insights here although the book is played primarily for laughs. It is difficult to dislike the people O'Rourke meets in his travels eventhough they dislike ech other to the point of killing. There is no strong political message in this book and O'Rourke does not burden us with any proposed solutions. Rather, he describes the scenes and the people in such a way as to recall to mind Oliver Hardy saying to Stan Laurel, "This is another fine mess you've gotten me into." I might mention that this is not a book for the ages. Although there will be no problem for the reasonably well informed now, in ten years you won't be able to get the jokes without reference to footnotes. 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.
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