In 1998, satirist P. J. O'Rourke announced his intention to write a memoir. The most serious problem with this idea, he wrote, is "that I haven't really done much. But I don't feel this should stand in my way. O. J. Simpson wrote a memoir, and the jury said he hadn't done anything at all." A sharp social critic, O'Rourke finds himself one of the most loved—or hated—literary figures of the twentieth century

Patrick Jake O'Rourke grew up in Toledo, Ohio. He went to the state university in Miami, Ohio (where he majored in English), and then to Johns Hopkins. He became a strong leftist which, according to him, caused some distress to his Republican grandmother. He says that he informed his grandmother that he was a Maoist, prompting the reply, "[j]ust so long as you're...