This site uses cookies to deliver our services, improve performance, for analytics, and (if not signed in) for advertising. By using LibraryThing you acknowledge that you have read and understand our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Your use of the site and services is subject to these policies and terms.
Opening with an introduction entitled Hunting the Virtuous - and How to Clean and Skin Them, the author provides his own comments on the people, places and events behind the newspaper headlines, before launching into an account of the Gulf War. Beginning with a concise history of the Middle East, he delivers an day-to-day chronicle of the tedium of waiting for war in the Saudi desert, signing off with an eyewitness account of the victory march into Kuwait city.… (more)
O'Rourke can occasionally be funny, but only rarely here. There are some humorous sections but others that are seemingly included to pad out the page count. As usual, O'Rourke launches into invectives about liberals and communism which are now just tiresome, and reports from the front line of the Gulf War. His invectives on Saddam Hussein are less poisonous than those on liberals, which may tell you what you will get with Give War a Chance( )
Funny in a way that you can predict what the next sentence is going to be in a "if you have read one you have read them all" kind of way. I think the visceral hatred for democrats is quite unwarranted and I did detect traces of racism.
... and from the nothingess of good works, she passed to the somethingess of ham and toast with great cheerfulness. --Charles Dickens, Barnaby Ridge
Dedication
Like many men of my generation, I had an opportunity to give war a chance, and I promptly chickened out. I went to my draft physical in 1970 with a doctor's letter about my history of drug abuse. The letter was four and a half pages long with three and a half pages devoted to listing the drugs I had abused. I was shunted into the office of an Army psychiatrist who, at the end of a forty-five minute interview with me, was pounding his desk and shouting, "You're fucked up! You don't belong in the Army." He was certainly right on the first count and possibly right on the second. Anyway, I didn't have to go. But that, of course, meant that someone else had to go in my place. I would like to dedicate this book to him.
I hope you got back in one piece, fellow. I hope you were more use to your platoon mates than I would have been. I hope you're rich and happy now. And in 1971, when somebody punched me in the face for being a long-haired peace creep, I hope that was you.
First words
(Introduction): This book is a collection of articles about -- if I may be excused for venturing upon a large theme -- the battle against evil.
A week after the surprise-party opening of East Germany's borders people were still gathering at the Berlin Wall, smiling at each other, drinking champagne and singing bits of old songs.
Quotations
Last words
And I hope all his bellicose, fanatical, senseless squirrel-mongering neighbors -- from Tel Aviv to Khartoum, from Tripoli to Tehran -- remember it too.
Opening with an introduction entitled Hunting the Virtuous - and How to Clean and Skin Them, the author provides his own comments on the people, places and events behind the newspaper headlines, before launching into an account of the Gulf War. Beginning with a concise history of the Middle East, he delivers an day-to-day chronicle of the tedium of waiting for war in the Saudi desert, signing off with an eyewitness account of the victory march into Kuwait city.