July 15, 2018
Noted wisenheimer O'Rourke (How the Hell Did This Happen? The Election of 2016, 2017, etc.) serves up a fan's notes on "a blood sport that I greatly enjoy"--namely, the dismal science of economics.Though a conservative on numerous mastheads and TV credits since the heyday of National Lampoon, the author isn't reflexive in his cheerleading for capitalism; after all, he notes, it was capitalists who "hoovered my investment portfolio in the 2008 financial crisis." Still, this is a mostly pro-free-market, conservative look at a complex subject that O'Rourke sometimes reduces to useful fundamentals--and that sometimes floats away on clouds of dumb abstraction. As to the former, the author points to the thought that the first thing a financial analyst needs to do is figure out how a company he or she is thinking of investing in makes money. In the instance of Enron, one mogul's staff reported back that they were "utterly ignorant" even after studying the company up close for a month--a lesson, O'Rourke suggests, in the virtues of ignorance, or at least not proceeding until one is less ignorant than at the start. Where things get interesting is when the author turns subtly critical in the matter of corporations. As he notes, things got sticky in the financial realm when the banks sold themselves out to "clueless stockholders," since the banks could then be comfortably managed by people who were clueless themselves. Of course, the whole business of corporate personhood is sticky. As for fundamentals, the author scores points with a sharp observation: The rise of credit cards suggests that the idea that goods and services seem sort of free if you don't have to pay straightaway yields a topsy-turvy financial world, one whose craziness can logically be resolved only with the use of a "9mm Glock--VISA card of the future."As with most of O'Rourke's books, a mix of the smart and the throwaway but fairly entertaining throughout.
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July 9, 2018
O’Rourke (What the Hell Just Happened?), a contributing editor at the Weekly Standard, omits nothing in his manic commentary on the state of consumerism, economics, and technology amid the ongoing “digital revolution,” ornamented with wry anecdotes from his journalistic career and personal life. Remembering his time reporting on war-torn 1990s Somalia, he muses, “Maybe one way to understand currency collapse is to go someplace where society has collapsed already”; in an equally insightful, albeit dramatically different moment, he solicits opinions about popular apps from his teenage daughter, “a one-girl focus group sitting right across the breakfast table, so deeply involved in the digital economy that her hair was dragging in her nut butter and chia seed toast.” Himself unimpressed with most modern innovations, he pinpoints “unnovations,” including texting and PowerPoint, he would erase if he could. In a different vein, a recollection of cleaning out his rural New England home’s chicken coop leads to a reconsideration of the phrase, “I’d rather be shoveling shit in hell,” and a (measured) new appreciation for the value of manual labor. While choppy and unfocused at times, the book makes a good case for humor’s helpfulness in confronting the modern world’s ever-present absurdities.
September 1, 2018
In his latest essay collection, satirist and commentator O'Rourke turns his attention to a subject fraught with confusion and muddled thinking: economics. Why do we have money? Is crypto-currency (such as Bitcoin) the currency of the future? Is the Digital Age a good thing or a bad thing? How much damage have digital media done to traditional media? Is the internet a powerful tool, or a disaster waiting to happen? As usual, O'Rourke displays a lively wit, and, also as usual, he deals in broad generalizations that may not sit well with some readers. ( Comic books are a medium for idiots. And so is the Internet. ) O'Rourke's style of commentary is different from, say, Dave Barry's or Andy Rooney's; his humor is more restrained than Barry's, and he's a whole lot less cantankerous than Rooney. But one thing's for sure: he has a razor-sharp intellect, and he writes without a shred of pretension or pontification. Another winner from an A-list humorist.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)