“There are thousands ofpeople in America who feel this way, especially after three or four drinks...” In the last days of the Reagan presidency, there can be little reading more enlightening than these selections from one of modern America’s master merrymakers, the writer described by Christopher Buckley as “S.J. Perelman on acid” These twenty-one “essays and outrages” by P.J. O’Rourke range from Things of the Intellect to The Ends ofthe Earth. They include a splendidly succinct Brief Histoy ofMan (on pages 3 and 4), comment on that “menace to the free world” the childproof bottle top (“a fine thing for a child who can spend all day mastering the technique of opening bleach containers . .. but an aspirin bottle equipped with such a device is a Gordian knot to an adult who drinks”), and guidance on driving a pick-up truck into the woods at sixty miles an hour. Adventures in the journalistic front-line — a visit to Lebanon (With Hostage and Hijacker in Sunny Beirut) and a perspective on Russia through the bottom of a vodka bottle in the company of a tourload of ageing leftists — stand beside an entertaining up-dating of Greek myths relating to topics sexual. Mean, outrageous, yet always wickedly funny, P.J. O’Rourke is one of America’s most widely published humorists. Currently the ‘investigative humorist’ on Rolling Stone, he was editor of NationalLampoon in the late I 970s’ and has been published in such organs as Car andDriver as well as Playboy and Esquire. Publisher: Picador Year: 1987 Binding: Paperback ISBN: 9780330300322 Condition: Fair Description: Tanned; cover worn & back creased. Note: This image is from a stock photo and may differ from the actual cover.
