Age and Guile: Beat Youth, Innocence and a Bad Haircut - Softcover

Parliament of Whores (1991) and Give War a Chance (1992) carried O'Rourke up the best-seller lists, but fans may be underwhelmed by this 25-year miscellany. The collection opens with six essays (one a quasi play), four "concrete" poems, and six unpublished short stories from O'Rourke's self-styled "student radical" days. Six (less than hilarious) pieces from his long tenure at National Lampoon are followed by oddball "automotive journalism," from Car and Driver and Automobile magazines, and a mixed-media section that brings together articles from Esquire, House and Garden, Smart, and Rolling Stone, plus the foreword to a friend's book and a speech for the libertarian Cato Institute. O'Rourke's "omnium gatherum" closes with commentary on current issues from Rolling Stone, the Wall Street Journal, and American Spectator, and (self-)mocking meditations on hunting, fishing, and golf from Rod and Reel and Men's Journal. There are certainly belly laughs here, but the whole reads more like "cut-and-paste" than "greatest hits." Too often, O'Rourke prefers shtick and scorn to satire, and some of his more recent essays (like those in his last book, All the Trouble in the World ) contain more mean-spirited whining than mordant wit. Still, he has built an enormous audience, and that alone ensures demand for anything with his name on it. Mary Carroll

Since most of O'Rourke's (All the Trouble in the World) books are collections, this retrospective is not so much a greatest-hits album as a variably entertaining grab bag of B-sides and other miscellany. There is giddy juvenilia he wrote for the 1970s underground press, including a hilarious hoax piece about Richard Nixon's trip to China. There are several arch tales about the 1960s that O'Rourke published in the National Lampoon, including an amusing attack on communism. His bumptiously ignorant persona serves him well as he explores high-end automobiles and such sports as fishing and golf for specialized magazines. O'Rourke's brief section on "Current and Recurrent Events" reminds us of his best political work; an even briefer selection of miscellany has some funnier stuff, including his uproarious dissection of a book tour. 150,000 first printing; author tour.
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