Peace Kills: America's Fun New Imperialism

by P. J. O'Rourke (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2005

  $5.62

  As the Los Angeles Times has hailed, When it comes to scouting the world for world-class absurdities, P.J.O'Rourke is the right man for the job. With his latest national best-seller, Peace Kills, P.J. casts his ever-shrewd and mordant eye on America's latest adventures in warfare. Imperialism has never been more fun. To unravel the mysteries of war, O'Rourke first visits Kosovo to find out what happens when we try to have one without hurting anybody: Wherever there's injustice, oppression, and suffering, America will show up six months later and bomb the country next to where it's happening. He travels to Israel at the ourbreak of the intifada. He flies to Egypt in the wake of the 9/11 terrorists' attacks and contemplates bygone lunacies. Why are the people in the Middle East so crazy? Here, at the pyramids, was an answer from the earliest days of civilization: People have always been crazy. He covers the demonstrations and the denunciations of war. French ideas, French beliefs, and French actions form a sort of lodestone for humanity. A moral compass needle needs a butt end. Wherever direction France is pointing--toward collaboration with Nazis, accommodation with communists, existentialism, Jerry Lewis, or a UN resolution veto--we can go the other way with a quiet conscience. Finally he arrives in Baghdad with the U.S. Army and, standing in one of Saddam's palaces, decides, If a reason for invading Iraq was needed, felony interior decorating would have sufficed. Peace Kills is P. J. O'Rourke as both incisive reporter and absurdist, relevant and irreverent, with a clear eye for everyone's confusion, including his own. O'Rourke understands that peace is sometimes one of themost troubling aspects of war.

• Used

  Paperback
  2004

  $3.25

• Used

  Hardcover
  2004

  $3.25

  In this latest collection of adventures, P. J. O'Rourke casts his mordant eye on America's recent forays into warfare. Imperialism has never been more fun. O'Rourke first travels to Kosovo, where he meets KLA veterans, Albanian refugees and peacekeepers, and confronts the paradox of 'the war that war-haters love to love'. He visits Egypt, Israel and Kuwait, where he witnesses citizens enjoying their newfound freedoms - namely, to shop, to eat and to sit around a lot. Following 11 September, O'Rourke examines the far-reaching changes in the US, from the absurd hassles of airport security; to the dangers of anthrax. In Iraq, he witnesses both the beginning and the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom and takes a tour of a presidential palace, concluding that the war was justified for at least one reason: criminal interior decorating. Peace Kills is an eye-opening look at a world much changed since O'Rourke wrote his bestselling Give War a Chance in which he declared the most troubling aspect of war is sometimes peace itself. 'The first thing you learn about P. J. O'Rourke is this: he cannot turn off his mirth valve. Such is the severity of P. J.'s condition that the only person to have more entries in The Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations is Oscar Wilde. This makes O'Rourke either the funniest man alive, or the wittiest heterosexual of all time' Mail on Sunday