None of My Business
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4.3 • 4 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The #1 New York Times–bestselling author takes on subjects from banking to bitcoin: “Another winner from an A-list humorist.” ―Booklist
Sharp-witted satirist and author of Parliament of Whores P. J. O’Rourke takes on his scariest subjects yet—business, investment, finance, and the political chicanery behind them.
Want to get rich overnight for free in three easy steps with no risk? Then don’t buy this book. (Actually, if you believe there’s a book that can do that, you shouldn’t buy any books because you probably can’t read.) P. J. O’Rourke’s approach to business, investment, and finance is different. He takes the risks for you in his chapter “How I Learned Economics by Watching People Try to Kill Each Other.” He proposes “A Way to Raise Taxes That We’ll All Love”—a 200% tax on celebrities. He offers a brief history of economic transitions before exploring the world of high tech innovation with a chapter on “Unnovations,” which asks, “The Internet—whose idea was it to put all the idiots on earth in touch with each other?” He misunderstands bitcoin, which seems “like a weird scam invented by strange geeks with weaponized slide rules in the high school Evil Math Club.” And finally, he offers a fanciful short story about the morning that P. J. wakes up and finds that all the world’s goods and services are free!
“The funniest writer in America.” ―The Wall Street Journal
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
O'Rourke (What the Hell Just Happened?), a contributing editor at the Weekly Standard, omits nothing in his manic commentary on the state of consumerism, economics, and technology amid the ongoing "digital revolution," ornamented with wry anecdotes from his journalistic career and personal life. Remembering his time reporting on war-torn 1990s Somalia, he muses, "Maybe one way to understand currency collapse is to go someplace where society has collapsed already"; in an equally insightful, albeit dramatically different moment, he solicits opinions about popular apps from his teenage daughter, "a one-girl focus group sitting right across the breakfast table, so deeply involved in the digital economy that her hair was dragging in her nut butter and chia seed toast." Himself unimpressed with most modern innovations, he pinpoints "unnovations," including texting and PowerPoint, he would erase if he could. In a different vein, a recollection of cleaning out his rural New England home's chicken coop leads to a reconsideration of the phrase, "I'd rather be shoveling shit in hell," and a (measured) new appreciation for the value of manual labor. While choppy and unfocused at times, the book makes a good case for humor's helpfulness in confronting the modern world's ever-present absurdities.
