Download Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence, and a Bad Haircut AudioBook Free
Readers may be shocked to learn that America's most provocative (and conservative) satirist, P. J. O'Rourke, was at onetime a raving pinko, with scars on his formerly bleeding heart to prove it. In Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence, and a negative Haircut, O'Rourke chronicles the amazing trajectory that took him from the lighthearted fun of the revolutionary barricades to the serious business of the nineteenth hole. How did the O'Rourke of 1970, who summarized the world of "grown-ups" as "materialism, sexual hang-ups, the Republican party, uncomfortable clothes, engagement rings, automobile accidents, Pat Boone, competition, patriotism, cheating, lying, ranch houses, and TV" become and only all those things? What causes a beatnik-hippie type, comfortable sleeping on dirty mattresses in pot-addled communes - as P. J. did when he was a writer for assorted "underground" papers-to metamorphosize into a right-wing middle-aged grouch? Here, P. J. shows how his Socialist idealism and avant-garde aesthetic tendencies were cured and how he acquired a healthy and commendable involvement in national defense, the balanced budget, Porsches, and Cohiba cigars. P. J. O'Rourke's message is that there surely is hope for all those experiencing acute Bohemianism, or as he puts it, "Pull your pants up, turn your hat around, and get a job." "From the fictionalized accounts of his career as a hard-drinking hippie to the Benchley-in-the-age-of-macho lampoon of fly fishing, Mr. O'Rourke shows an incorrigible comic gift and an eye for detail that keeps the wild stuff grounded." - THE BRAND NEW York Times Book Review
