P. J. O'Rourke

"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 are what Americans have been since the Roanoke Colony got lost. This astute and entertaining look at the state of these United States includes essays on everything from our fraught history ("O Beautiful for . . . Pilgrim Feet?") to the political effects of social media ("Whose Bright Idea Was It to Make Sure that Every...

"Ranging over five decades, Thrown Under the Omnibus is the definitive anthology of the journalist the Wall Street Journal has called 'the funniest writer in America'"--Flyleaf.

"When The Penguin Dictionary of Modern Humorous Quotations was published in 1987, P. J. O'Rourke had more entries than any living writer. And he kept writing funny stuff for another thirty-five years. Now, for the first time, P.J.'s best quips and riffs have been collected in one volume, edited by his longtime friend and award-winning magazine editor Terry McDonell. The Funny Stuff is organized by subject in alphabetical order from Agriculture to...

In 1988 the author moved to Washington to take a long look at our government and to find an answer to the question every American asks: What the hell do these guys do all day, and why does it cost so much money? In his Introduction, he proffers the theory that we are suffering under a dictatorship of boredom. Adopting the manner of a high school civics textbook, he covers the three branches of government -- legislative, executive, judicial -- in a...

P.J. O'Rourke embarks on supposedly more comfortable and allegedly less dangerous travels, often with family in tow, which mostly leave him wishing he were under artillery fire again. The essays take O'Rourke on a whirlwind of adventures, beginning at the National Mall in Washington, which he describes as having been designed with the same amazing 'greatest generation' aesthetic sensibility that informed his parents' living room.

In Modern Manners cultural guru P. J. O'Rourke provides the essential accessory for the truly contemporary man or woman-a rulebook for living in a world without rules. Traditionally, good manners were a means of becoming as bland and invisible as everyone else, and thus of avoiding calling attention to one's own awkwardness and stupidity. Today, with everyone wanting to appear special, stupidity is at a premium and manners-as outrageous and bizarre...

In the spirit of his savagely funny and national best-seller Parliament of Whores, Give War a Chance is P. J. O'Rourke's number one New York Times bestselling follow-up. O'Rourke runs hilariously amok by tackling the death of Communism, sanctimonious liberals, and America's perennial bad guy Saddam Hussein in a series of classic dispatches from his coverage of the 1991 Gulf War. Here is our most mordant and unnervingly funny political satirist on:...

P.J. O'Rourke reads Adam Smith's revolutionary The Wealth of Nations so you don't have to. Recognized almost instantly on its publication in 1776 as the fundamental work of economics, The Wealth of Nations was also recognized as really long: the original edition totaled over nine hundred pages in two volumes--including the blockbuster sixty-seven-page "digression concerning the variations in the value of silver during the course of the last four centuries,...