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    Driving Like Crazy: Thirty Years of Vehicular Hell-bending Celebrating America the Way It’s Supposed to Be--With an Oil Well in Every Backyard, a Cadillac Escalade in Every Carport, and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Mowing Our Lawn
    Driving Like Crazy: Thirty Years of Vehicular Hell-bending Celebrating America the Way It’s Supposed to Be--With an Oil Well in Every Backyard, a Cadillac Escalade in Every Carport, and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Mowing Our Lawn
    Driving Like Crazy: Thirty Years of Vehicular Hell-bending Celebrating America the Way It’s Supposed to Be--With an Oil Well in Every Backyard, a Cadillac Escalade in Every Carport, and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Mowing Our Lawn
    Audiobook7 hours

    Driving Like Crazy: Thirty Years of Vehicular Hell-bending Celebrating America the Way It’s Supposed to Be--With an Oil Well in Every Backyard, a Cadillac Escalade in Every Carport, and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Mowing Our Lawn

    Written by P. J. O'Rourke

    Narrated by Christopher Lane

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Driving Like Crazy celebrates cars and author P. J. O’Rourke’s love for them, while chronicling the golden age of the automobile in America. O’Rourke takes us on a whirlwind tour of the world’s most scenic and bumpiest roads in trouble-laden cross-country treks, from a 1978 Florida-to-California escapade in a 1956 special four-door Buick sedan to a 1983 thousand-mile effort across Mexico in the Baja 1000 to a trek through Kyrgyzstan in 2006 on the back of a Soviet army surplus six-wheel-drive truck. For longtime fans of the celebrated humorist, the collection features a host of O’Rourke’s classic pieces on driving, including “How to Drive Fast on Drugs While Getting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink,” about the potential misdeeds one might perform in the front (and back) seat of an automobile; “The Rolling Organ Donors Motorcycle Club,” which chronicles a seven-hundred-mile weekend trip through Michigan and Indiana that O’Rourke took on a Harley Davidson alongside Car & Driver publisher David E. Davis, Jr.; his brilliant and funny piece from Rolling Stone on NASCAR and its peculiar culture, recorded during an alcohol-fueled weekend in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1977; and an hilarious account of a trek from Islamabad to Calcutta in Land Rover’s new Discovery Trek.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    Release dateJun 1, 2009
    ISBN9781423396758
    Driving Like Crazy: Thirty Years of Vehicular Hell-bending Celebrating America the Way It’s Supposed to Be--With an Oil Well in Every Backyard, a Cadillac Escalade in Every Carport, and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Mowing Our Lawn
    Author

    P. J. O'Rourke

    P. J. O'Rourke is the bestselling author of ten books, including Eat the Rich, Give War a Chance, Holidays in Hell, Parliament of Whores, All the Trouble in the World, The CEO of the Sofa and Peace Kills. He has contributed to, among other publications, Playboy, Esquire, Harper's, New Republic, the New York Times Book Review and Vanity Fair. He is a regular correspondent for the Atlantic magazine. He divides his time between New Hampshire and Washington, D.C.

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    Reviews for Driving Like Crazy

    3.5/5

    45 ratings5 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Not being a gear-head I probably missed more than a few of the nuances in this collection of car-centric columns, but they are well written and entertaining enough to be worth a read even if you replace every car-centric paragraph with the phrase doohickey and thingamajig, or if you skip them entirely.
    • 4/5
      “Fun saves us from political dictatorship.” — P.J. O'Rourke, “Driving Like Crazy”Conservative political humorist P.J. O'Rourke has always regarded cars in general and driving cars in particular as fun. Thus the above line from his 2009 book “Driving Like Crazy” nicely combines two of the main themes of his writing life into one pithy declaration.Although the book includes a few digs at the likes of Sarah Palin, Barack Obama and the Bushes, his main focus throughout is cars and how much fun they are.Besides being a political writer, O'Rourke has also written frequently for car magazines and for other magazines on the subject of cars. Most of the chapters in his book originally appeared as magazine articles or are based on articles he has written. He gives readers no notice of this beforehand, which could cause some readers to get no further than the first chapter, a celebration of the youthful pleasures of driving fast while drinking to excess, doing drugs and having wild sex. This is a satire he wrote years ago for National Lampoon, but he doesn't tell us this until later.Most chapters concern test drives or endurance races through difficult areas, such as India and Baja California. In each case there are problems aplenty, sometimes mechanical and sometimes not, and there would be a sameness to these accounts except that O'Rourke's jokes are always different. And if O'Rourke drives cars for fun, we read his books for fun.Here's a sample of his wit about the Jeep: "My personal theory about the visceral appeal of the Jeep is that it is purposeful-looking while having no clear purpose. The Jeep is inadequate as a pickup, drafty as a sedan, oversized as an ATV, and lacks sufficient cargo space to be an SUV. True, Jeeps will go almost everyplace but, if you think about it, Jeeps mostly go everyplace there's no reason to go."Then there's this comment he makes, in an interview at the end of the book, about the federal government subsidizing General Motors: "Governments have monopolies on certain things, like eminent domain and deadly force. What's another example of an organization that gets into the same business that you're in, except that their guys have got guns? That would be the Mob."There he goes again. Cars and politics.
    • 4/5
      PJ O'Rourke is an American right wing political journalist and crazy libertarian. This book, in particular, reveals him as the US answer to Jeremy Clarkson, with the same iconoclastic sense of humour and ability to annoy the more sensitive among us. The book is mostly a compilation or retelling of magazine articles and the earlier stuff is better than what comes later. It's also interesting to see what he makes, thirty years on, of these early pieces. By the end of the book he is driving across America in a station wagon with three kids and his wife and visiting national parks. Not quite as interesting as the earlier bits where he tells us that the most important criterion for choosing an off road car is that it should be a rental car. You can take it anywhere you like and getting back isn't really your problem.The first half would probably rate four or five stars, but overall, only 3 and a half.
    • 3/5
      The first part was very funny and I laughed out loud several times listening to it. But I think even the author gets bored with all the "car trip; lots of things break" stories and the humor really trails off.
    • 4/5
      P.J. O'Rourke has been writing about driving for half his life, and his love for all things four (and, indeed, two) wheeled is evident in Driving Like Crazy, a funny, irreverent collection of insights compiled from his many car articles over thirty years. I've been reading his books for almost as long, and although not the foremost authority on this brand of 'Gonzo' journalism (that prize will always belong to the late, great Hunter S. Thompson) he is still one of the most entertaining humourists around. Even those who can't be classified as 'petrolheads' will find more laughs per page than a long list of the current bestsellers.