Peace Kills

In this latest collection of adventures, P. J. O'Rourke casts his mordant eye on America's recent forays into warfare. Imperialism has never been more fun. O'Rourke first travels to Kosovo, where he meets KLA veterans, Albanian refugees and peacekeepers, and confronts the paradox of 'the war that war-haters love to love'. He visits Egypt, Israel and Kuwait, where he witnesses citizens enjoying their newfound freedoms - namely, to shop, to eat and to sit around a lot. Following 11 September, O'Rourke examines the far-reaching changes in the US, from the absurd hassles of airport security; to the dangers of anthrax. In Iraq, he witnesses both the beginning and the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom and takes a tour of a presidential palace, concluding that the war was justified for at least one reason: criminal interior decorating.

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.