The C.E.O. of the Sofa

In The CEO of the Sofa, P. J. tackles everything and the kitchen sink, fighting evil, injustice, and absurdity with the gloves off and the oven mitts on. New York Times best-selling author P. J. O'Rourke lobbed one-liners on the battlefields of the Gulf War, traded quips with communist rebels in the jungles of the Philippines, and went undercover at the Dome of the Rock Mosque as P. .J. of Arabia. Now, in his most challenging adventure, he journeys to the heart of that truly harrowing place-his living room. He waxes cynical over the election of Hillary Clinton. He waxes nostalgic over learning to drive. He waxes poetic as he adds happy endings for liberals to famous tragedies. Now if he would just wax the kitchen floor. And P. J. does still get off the couch and embark on exotic adventures-to the magical land of India, to the U. N. Millen­nial Summit, to a blind (drunk) wine tasting with Christopher Buckley, and, most exotical of all, to a Motel 6 where he has twenty-eight channels and a bathroom to himself.

P. J. O'Rourke wrote more than twenty books on subjects as diverse as politics and cars and etiquette and economics. Parliament of Whores and Give War a Chance both reached #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. He was a contributing editor at the Weekly Standard, H. L. Mencken Research Fellow at the Cato Institute, a regular panellist on NPR's Wait Wait . . . Don't Tell Me, and editor-in-chief of the web magazine American Consequences. Long a resident of rural New England, as far away from the things he wrote about as he could get, he died in 2022 at the age of 74.