Driving Like Crazy cover art

Driving Like Crazy

Thirty Years of Vehicular Hell-bending

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Driving Like Crazy

By: P. J. O'Rourke
Narrated by: Christopher Lane
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About this listen

P. J. O'Rourke, 'the funniest writer in America', harbours a guilty pleasure – ever since growing up the son of a car dealer in Ohio, he has been crazy about cars.

In Driving Like Crazy, he reveals in his love for all things vehicular. From a thousand-mile expedition across Mexico, to a trek through Kyrgyzstan in the back of the Soviet army surplus truck, from an alcohol-fuelled weekend in North Carolina, to an eventful journey from Islamabad to Calcutta, and from Buicks to Land Rovers to Harley-Davidson's, P.J. O'Rourke gets behind the wheel to take us on a hell-bending tour of some of the world’s most scenic – and most treacherous – roads.

Along the way ,he muses on everything from the peculiar joys of NASCAR, to what type of car handles best, to the mind-boggling misdemeanours it is possible to perform in the front (and back) seat.

Spanning over 30 years, and combining O'Rourke's classic journalism with original, previously unpublished pieces, this is P. J. at his gonzo best: it is an inimitably humorous and pleasurable celebration of cars, speed, and the open road. Fasten your seatbelts; you're in for a bumpy ride.

©2009 P.J. O'Rourke (P)2010 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd Entertainment & Celebrities Travel Writing & Commentary Witty
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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.

Not even a "guilty pleasure"

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