Old car articles, revisited

P.J. O'Rourke has a new book coming out called Driving Like Crazy. Andrew Wheeler offers his initial review:

The most debilitating disease that can strike an aging writer isn't cancer or alcoholism or writer's block — no matter how many writers each of those has felled over the years — but the insatiable desire to argue with and correct his own younger self, the urge to redo and fix all of the things he now thinks he did wrong the first time through. That urge led Wordsworth around in circles, endlessly bulking up The Prelude while avoiding work on the much longer work it was supposed to be a prelude to. It led Asimov and Heinlein and many others to tie up loose ends — much better left loose — in earlier works, and countless others to clean up and rewrite and expurgate books that suddenly didn't look as exciting and vibrant as they had when they were written.

And now the same fever has struck P.J. O'Rourke; Driving Like Crazy is a collection of his writings on cars — mostly from the early 1980s — rewritten and reorganized and stuck together to resemble a book with a single narrative . . . which, of course, it can't be. He was smart enough to know that he couldn't touch his classic essay "How to Drive Fast on Drugs While Getting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink" — which leads off this book, after the new, depressive introduction, "The End of the American Car" — but he throws in a new piece on essentially the same subject immediately after it to take a few jabs at his younger self, and, more subtly, to point out to the reader that the younger O'Rourke is not to be trusted and wasn't having nearly as much fun as he said he was.

In spite of the caveats, I'll almost certainly end up buying this one . . . although I have found the earlier P.J. O'Rourke books to be more entertaining reading than the more recent ones (Holidays in Hell and Parliament of Whores are both excellent).