Give War a Chance: Eyewitness Accounts of Mankind's Struggle Against Tyranny, Injustice, and Alcohol-Free Beer.

PJ. O'ROURKE made a big mistake in last year's best-selling, hilariously funny, Parliament of Whores: he labeled himself a humorist. By doing so, he became not a political commentator who is funny but rather someone who by definition must be funny and happens to talk politics -- thus raising expectations for this collection of essays and book reviews from the Eighties. The reader has to trudge through some ho-hum stuff before he comes to the doozies--the ones he bought the book for. O'Rourke remains his cutesy self: he explains that his title at Rolling Stone is Foreign Affairs Desk Chief only because "Middle-Aged Drunk didn't look good on business cards." Both his virtue and his vice is his way of explaining the most complicated subjects in the simplest of terms: "Until 1918 the Arabian peninsula was ruled by the Ottoman Empire, so called because it had the same amount of intelligence and energy as a footstool." He expresses hefty and sharp truths simply and originally, but he has become so much a part of his own writing, of his own free-expressive style that he's constrained to conform with it and make it funny. Which is why Atlantic Monthly is able to publish this out-of-date material for the simple pleasure of an O'Rourke smorgasbord.