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.
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