P. J. O’Rourke takes the decline of the American car personally. And not just because his family has sold Buicks for three generations. In his latest book Driving Like Crazy, O’Rourke sees the very story of our nation written in the crazy, chrome-clad arc of American automobilia. From “the sheer genius that transformed the 1908 Model T into the 1965 Shelby Cobra GT500 in a single human lifetime of speeding tickets” to the industry’s decades-long “sayonara,” O’Rourke reflects on where we’ve been and what we drove to get there. But he also knows that cars are about more important things than mere cultural and political commentary. They’re about fun. Fast fun. Busting axles in Baja fun. Pointing a big, noisy car at the horizon and burying the gas pedal fun. And what’s more American than that?
