The best reason to read National Review is Florence King. She has a column and a book review in this issue, making the magazine twice as good. Her review is of P.J. O’Rourke’s Driving Like Crazy, and she has this gem:
This man really does love cars, so some readers will be lost when he lapses into good-ol’-boy mode, e.g., “a hydraulic-fluid-filled device with variable pitch blades that delivered power from the 322-cubic-inch V-8 . . .” I have no idea what that means, but I can see Russia from my house.
His prose occasionally goes over the top, as in his description of the pink goo oozing from Ralph Nader’s crushed skull, but he atones for it with this: “The American automobile industry . . . will live on in some form, a Marley’s ghost dragging its corporate chains at taxpayer expense.” I forget whether that’s called a simile or a metaphor, but an English sentence never had a better tune-up. P. J. O’Rourke might be mad, bad, and dangerous to know, but he can write like an angel.
One more book for my to read list.
Posted by Hubbard in Age and Guile and P.J. O'Rourke, Belles Lettres