Not even a "guilty pleasure"

PJ O'Rourke is a master of the comic sneer. At his best, he is a terrific deflater of puffed up egos and, he's far smarter than the rabidly right-wing, mid Western rube he pretends to be.

The problem here is that he loves cars and that, at bottom, he's a satirist. There's good stuff here - the opening piece (which appears in several of his other collections) is hilarious, even if he immediately disavows it in a follow up. And I quite enjoyed a piece on NASCAR in its heyday but really after - three separate articles on trips to the Baja peninsula and a real dud of a piece on motorbikes in the seventies, I began to feel that the bottom of the barrel had been reached. PJ might have been having fun behind the wheel but I wasn't enjoying hearing about it much.

I can only assume that the man himself has money troubles and that these explain this poorly edited selection. However, if you want to help out with the alimony or whatever it is, that is bothering the self professed "funniest American writer since Thurber" may I suggest that would be well-wishers might do better with Holidays in Hell, Republican Party Reptile or even Parliament of Whores than this, in which the narrator ends up sounding like the middle aged bar-room bore he has always threatened to become.

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