None of My Business

Delving into the world of big money has all the excitement of being a war correspondent with only two-thirds of the danger. In None of My Business, P.J. O'Rourke takes forty-five years of experience making fun of terrible things in some of the world's most awful places and applies it to a place that's even worse-Wall Street. 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.'s approach to business, investment, finance, and innovation is different. He takes the risks for you in his chapter "How I Learned Economics by Watching People Try to Kill Each Other," detailing the economic lessons he learned while reporting in some of the most turbulent combat zones across the world. P.J. has his eye on the present as well as the past. He explores the world of high tech innovation with a chapter on the Internet, which poses the question, "whose idea was it to put every idiot in the world in touch with every other idiot?" P.J. is baffled by bitcoin, which seems to him "like a weird scam invented by strange geeks with weaponized slide rules in the high school Evil Math Club." And he writes a fanciful short story about the morning he wakes up to find that all the world's goods and services are free-with disastrous (and hilarious) results for the rule of law and the harmony of society. This is P.J. at his finest, a book that reminds us that when everything around us is Liar's Poker, all we can do is fold-with laughter.