Thrown Under the Omnibus

'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 wrote more than twenty books on subjects as diverse as politics and cars and etiquette and economics. Parliament of Whores and Give War a Chance both reached #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. He was a contributing editor at the Weekly Standard, H. L. Mencken Research Fellow at the Cato Institute, a regular panellist on NPR's Wait Wait . . . Don't Tell Me, and editor-in-chief of the web magazine American Consequences. Long a resident of rural New England, as far away from the things he wrote about as he could get, he died in 2022 at the age of 74.



P.J. O'Rourke is the rarest of breeds; a veteran rightwinger who is both funny and clever but not bitter at all... It's very funny, utterly thought-provoking... O'Rourke emerges as a hero for admitting what few of his generation dare to.



Few journalists are as bold and iconoclastic as P.J. O'Rourke... Thoroughly entertaining.



P.J. O'Rourke is what happens when America does Grumpy Old Men. Instead of sour-faced curmudgeons bleating that "politics is just a load of crap", you get a succession of amusing and incisive observations about why politics is a load of crap.



Here is (nearly) everything you wanted to know about P. J. O'Rourke but were afraid to ask.