P J O Rourke

P.J. O'Rourke, foreign affairs desk chief for Rolling Stone and self-proclaimed Republican Party reptile, dedicates his newest collection of magazine pieces to a man he doesn't know--the poor fool drafted in his place after O'Rourke convinced an Army psychiatrist, in 1970, that extensive drug use made him unfit for military service. That about sums up O'Rourke's brand of humor: mocking on the surface but serious beneath, sharply attuned to quotidian hypocrisy and contradiction.

The only thing more unpleasant than a well-versed liberal is an intelligent conservative. In the case P.J. O'Rourke and "All the Trouble in the World" we have an intelligent conservative who's also effete, sartorially smug, in a state of perpetual preppiness and somewhere to the right of Judge Robert Bork, traveling to Haiti, Somalia, Bangladesh, Vietnam, what used to be Yugoslavia, what used to be Czechoslovakia and what used to be a pristine rain forest before he got there.

Holidays in Heck P.J. O'Rourke Atlantic Monthly Press: 288 pp., $23

Gulfbound: ABC Radio has hired Rolling Stone magazine reporter P.J. O'Rourke to cover the Persian Gulf War for its youth audience. O'Rourke's reports will be heard on ABC Radio's youth-oriented rock, FM and contemporary programming networks. He will report from Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, the New York-based network announced. The correspondent will specialize in covering troops, ABC said.

It's pretty tiresome when someone defends his own little ethnic corner every time somebody says something they don't like. It seems to me absurd to denounce P. J. O'Rourke as a "racist" when he so obviously picks on everybody. I guess everybody thinks their own ethnic corner is flawless. If O'Rourke helps everyone to lighten up he's doing a great service. JOHN DEGATINA Studio City