Kirjahaku

In the twenty-one pieces collected in this book, P.J. O’Rourke visits the Lebanese civil war and the Marcos election campaign, sees Russia through the bottom of a vodka bottle and examines sundry aspects of Western civilization, such as the great bicycle menace, the history of the last fifteen minutes and ‘How to drive fast on drugs while getting your wing-wang squeezed and not spill your drink’ ‘This boozy hymn to home – to America – is funny because it is resonantly true . . . For conservatives and liberals, or for anyone bent double under the weight of political earnestness, Republican Party Reptile is a wonderful bonus indeed’ Wall Street Journal ‘He is funny. As with Evelyn Waugh, I can see why he makes me laugh, but I can’t see why he makes me laugh so much’ Chris Peachment, The Times ‘The funniest wind-up artist to emerge from America since Hunter S. Thompson’ Time Out ‘P.J. O’Rourke has to be the funniest writer going, and boy does he go. This is high-octane wit, S. J. Perelman on acid’ Christopher Buckley ‘Extremely literate, funny, irreverent and refreshingly unpatriotic . . . these essays are a delight’ Daily Telegraph ‘The funniest American writer I have read since Thurber’ Tom Sharpe

The author of Give War a Chance offers a hilarious guide to domestic life, covering the arts of cooking, cleaning, and housekeeping for people who do not know how to do any of these things and who refuse to learn. Original.

The author of Parliament of Whores returns with an international tour of the folly and foibles of finance, traveling to Cuba, Albania, Sweden, Hong Kong, Moscow, and Tanzania, among other locales, to find out if money does indeed make the world go round. Reprint. 150,000 first printing. Tour.

P.J. O'Rourke says we've worked ourselves into a state of anger and perplexity, and it's no surprise because perplexed and angry is what America has always been all about. This uproarious look at the current state of the United States includes essays like 'The New Puritanism - and Welcome to It,' about the upside of being 'woke' (and unable to get back to sleep); 'Sympathy vs. Empathy,' which considers whether it's better to have an idea of how people feel or to bust their skulls to get inside their heads; 'A Brief Digression on the Additional Hell of the Internet of Things' because your juicer is sending fake news to your FitBit about what's in your refrigerator; and many more.A couple of extra perks include a quiz to determine where you stand on the spectrum of 'Coastals vs. Heartlanders' and a 'An Inauguration Speech I'd Like To Hear:' ask not what your country can do for you. Ask me how I can get the hell out of here. Featuring extensive coverage from the 2020 campaign trail, this is P.J. at his acerbic best.

After decades covering war and disaster, bestselling author and acclaimed satirist P. J. O'Rourke takes on his scariest subjects yet: business, investment, finance and the political chicanery behind them.Want to get rich overnight for free in 3 easy steps with no risk? Then don't buy this book. (Actually, if you believe there's a book that can do that, you shouldn't buy any books because you probably can't read.) P.J.'s approach to business, investment and finance is different. He takes the risks for you in his chapter 'How I Learned Economics by Watching People Try to Kill Each Other.' He proposes 'A Way to Raise Taxes That We'll All Love' - a 200% tax on celebrities. He offers a brief history of economic transitions before exploring the world of high-tech innovation with a chapter on 'Unnovations,' which asks, 'The Internet - whose idea was it to put all the idiots on earth in touch with each other?' He pokes fun at bitcoin, and closes with a fanciful short story about the morning that he wakes up and finds that all the world's goods and services are free! This is P.J. at his finest, a book not to be missed.

With new, updated material, P. J. O'Rourke covers the whole election process from the pig pile of presidential candidates circa June 2015, through his come-to-Satan moment with Hillary and the Beginning of End Times in November 2016, to the current shape of US politics.How the Hell Did This Happen? answers the key question of the 2016 presidential election: Should we laugh or should we cry or should we hurl? (They are not mutually exclusive.)

A hilarious look at the aging baby boomer generation from the author the Spectator labelled 'what happens when America does Grumpy Old Men'.The Baby Boom - over-sized, overwrought, overbearing, and all over the place, from Donovan to Obama. The generation that said with a straight face, 'We are the world.'What's so funny about peace, love and understanding? Ask the generation responsible for the fall of the Berlin Wall and their knickers. Who put their faith in the Kyoto Accord and disco. Who dropped out of the capitalist system and popped back again in time to cause a global financial crisis.How did the Baby Boom become what it is and who let them get away with it?

Holidays in Heck takes the reader on a globe-trotting journey to far-reaching places including China, Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan and the Galapagos Islands. The collection begins after the Iraq War, when P.J. retired from being a war correspondent because he was "too old to keep being scared stiff and too stiff to keep sleeping on the ground." Instead he embarked on supposedly more comfortable and allegedly less dangerous travels - often with family in tow - which mostly left him wishing he were under artillery fire again. The result is a hilarious and oftentimes moving portrait of life in the fast lane - only this time as a husband and father of three.Adventures include:- The first stag hunt in Britain after hunting had been banned. If the British had been half as caring about Indians and American colonists as they are about animals, they'd still rule the world.- A month-long tour of mainland China's economic hubs where P.J. learned that the entire Chinese concept of political freedom and individual liberty can be summed up in the words, 'New Buick'.- A harrowing horseback ride across the mountains of Kyrgyzstan - no towns, no roads, no people. "If something happened to my horse it would be shot. For me, the medical treatment wouldn't be that sophisticated."

'Whether you agree with him or not, P.J. writes a helluva piece.' Richard Nixon P.J. O'Rourke has had a prolific career as one of America's most celebrated humourists. But that career almost didn't happen. As he tells it, 'I began to write for pay in the spring of 1970. To tell the truth I didn't even mean to be a writer, I meant to be a race car driver, but I didn't have a race car.' Fortunately for us, he had to settle for writing. From his early pieces for the National Lampoon ('How to Drive fast on Drugs While Getting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink'), through his classic reporting as Rolling Stone's International Affairs editor in the 80s and 90s ('Among the Euroweenies'), and his brilliant, inimitable political journalism and analysis (Parliament of Whores, Give War a Chance, Eat the Rich), P.J. has been entertaining and provoking readers with high octane prose, a gonzo Republican attitude and a rare ability to make you laugh out loud while silently reading to yourself. For the first time Thrown Under the Omnibus brings together his funniest, most outrageous, most controversial and most loved pieces in the definitive P.J. reader.

'P. J. O'Rourke was the funniest writer of his generation, one of the smartest and one of the most prolific. Now that he belongs to the ages, P.J. takes his rightful place along with Oscar Wilde, Mark Twain and Dorothy Parker in the Pantheon of Quote Gods.' Christopher Buckley from his introductionWhen The Penguin Dictionary of Modern Humorous Quotations was published in 1994, P. J. O'Rourke had more entries than any living writer. And he kept writing funny stuff for another 28 years. Now, for the first time, the best material is collected in one volume. Edited by his longtime friend Terry McDonell, The Funny Stuff is arranged in six sections, organized by subject in alphabetical order from Agriculture to Xenophobia. Not only did P.J. write memorable one-liners, he also meticulously constructed riffs that built to a crescendo of hilarity and outrage - and are still being quoted years later. His prose has the electric verbal energy of Tom Wolfe or Hunter S. Thompson, but P.J. is more flat-out funny. And through it all comes his clear-eyed take on politics, economics, human nature - and fun. The Funny Stuff is a book for P.J. fans to devour but also a book that will bring new readers and stand as testament to one of the truly original American writers of the last 50 years.

A New York Times BestsellerAs P. J. O'Rourke says, 'It's as if Smith, having proved that we can all have more money, then went on to prove that money doesn't buy happiness. And it doesn't. It rents it.'Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations was first published in 1776 and almost instantly was recognized as fundamental to an understanding of economics. It was also recognized as being really long and as P. J. O'Rourke points out, to understand The Wealth of Nations, the cornerstone of free-market thinking and a book that shapes the world to this day, you also need to peruse Smith's earlier doorstopper, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. But now you don't have to read either, because P. J. has done it for you. In this hilarious work P. J. shows us why Smith is still relevant, why what seems obvious now was once revolutionary, and how the division of labour, freedom of trade and pursuit of self-interest espoused by Smith are not only vital to the welfare of mankind, they're funny too. He goes on to establish that far from being an avatar of capitalism, Smith was actually a moralist of liberty.

'America's greatest prose comedian' -- Anthony Quinn, Sunday TimesGrowing up as the son of a car dealer in Ohio, P. J. O'Rourke, 'the funniest writer in America', has always been crazy about cars. Driving Like Crazy revels in his love for all things vehicular.Jump in and buckle-up. P. J. O'Rourke delivers his rapid-fire wit from the driver's seat of Buicks, Land Rovers, Harley-Davidsons and at least one Soviet army surplus truck. Driving Like Crazy is a hilarious collection of fender-bending pieces that career along at O'Rourke's full-throttle, breakneck Gonzo best...Praise for Driving Like Crazy:'A rollicking ride through three decades of O'Rourke's car journalism, combining classic articles and new material with his trademark merciless skewering of liberal niceties and political correctness at every turn.' Philip Sherwell, Sunday Telegraph'P. J. O'Rourke's homage to the highway is an exhilarating and hilarious ride... Nobody can argue with the fantastic forward rush of O'Rourke's prose... it's why you're glad you went along for the ride.' Giles Smith, The Times 'O'Rourke is America's funniest writer, having stolen the flag of Gonzo from Hunter S. Thompson... The pieces make great travel writing - stripped-down, yet evocative. O'Rourke fans will find plenty to enjoy in Driving Like Crazy.' Stephen Price, Sunday Business Post'Whatever the topic, P J O'Rourke is equal parts hilarity and extremity.' Daily Telegraph

Best-selling humorist P.J. O'Rourke is back with his latest political masterpiece, DON'T VOTE - It Just Encourages the Bastards. Using his signature wit and keen observational skills, O'Rourke reflects on his forty year career as a political commentator, spanning his addled hippie youth to his current state of right-wing grouch maturity. Proclaiming his political stance as to the right of Rush Limbaugh, O'Rourke explores ideas ranging from why Americans love freedom and the founding fathers' unique perspective on the pursuit of happiness to the modern application of the Bill of Rights, an odd document of which Americans are inordinately proud, that guarantees their rights to Twitter, kvetch, and prevent the Pentagon from sending Marines to sleep on fold-out couches. Far from the typical high school textbook's survey of United States history, DON'T VOTE takes a hysterically sharp look at some of the most important issues Americans face today.

Confessions, Adventures, Essays, And (other) Outrages of P. J. O'rourke, this is the first collection of wildly humorous essays from the former editor-in-chief of National Lampoon.