Arthur Chrenkoff remembers the first of P.J. O’Rourke’s books he discovered in Australia after his family emigrated from Poland:

I haven’t heard of this O’Rourke fellow, but Holidays in Hell is a great title. I’ve always enjoyed reading about other countries, and the concept of travelling to war zones and other shitholes seems like a fertile territory for satire. Plus, as I see in the table of contents, O’Rourke had travelled to Poland a year before my family had left it. We were roughly in the same place at the same time. Now I just have to find out what this zany American thought of my homeland. I’m sold. So is the book.

It was a 50 cents well spent. I have the book next to my keyboard as I’m typing these words. It’s the first British edition, printed in in 1989 by Picador, so it would have been four or five years old when I bought it. It doesn’t look like it has aged at all since then. Maybe the paper is a tad more yellow but that’s about it. “What do they do for fun in Warsaw” is on page 83 (in the table of contents, the city is misspelled “Warshaw”, which actually makes it closer to the original Warszawa, the English “sh” being the same as the Polish “sz” sound – don’t say you didn’t learn anything new today). It was glorious, capturing with all of O’Rourke’s sardonic majesty the death rattles of the system that would collapse only three years later (not that any of us foresaw it). “I didn’t see any Evil Empire,” wrote P J, “that would have been too interesting. Communism doesn’t really starve or execute that many people. Mostly it just bores them to death”.

I enjoyed the rest of the book too, from civil war-torn Lebanon to divided Central America – the rightist El Salvador and the commie Nicaragua. Over the next few years I feasted on Republican Party Reptile. Parliament of Whores and Give War a Chance. I even managed to get to O’Rourke’s original non-political writing, Modern Manners and The Bachelor Home Companion, which I found just as funny if also less depressing than politics. Then I read all the new books as they came out. While it’s impolite to speak ill of the dead, I have found P J O’Rourke after 2000 increasingly struggling to be funny. His last output over the past six or so years as this “Republican Party reptile” and arch-libertarian ended up voting for Hillary Clinton because he didn’t like Donald Trump was cringeworthy and sad to read, which is did less and less of, until I did none at all. But it doesn’t change the fact that when P J was good – in the 1980s and 90s – he was a god. There was no one and nothing like him. He singlehandedly made right-of-centre sensibilities hip and the left ridiculous, which is the best weapon against those who fancy themselves too much.

At this point in time I should probably apologise for lying – P J O’Rourke did not save my life, though that sounded a lot sexier than any other title I could think of. What P J had done for me, however, was just as important: he set me on the right path.
The line from growing up in communist Poland forty years ago to The Daily Chrenk today might seem pretty straightforward in hindsight, but for a while in the early 1990s it got somewhat twisted and crooked, as lines tend to do when you attend university. Not only was I suddenly exposed in my Arts degree (majoring in Government, or political science, with a minor in History) to 50 Shades of Left, but I had embarked on wide-ranging reading spree of my own (nothing wrong with that; I still do), involving writers and topics as diverse as Noam Chomsky, the JFK assassination conspiracy theories, Robert Anton Wilson and Edmund Burke. Being a late developer, I went through the teenage phase of hating everyone and everything while in my early 20s. I was alone and homeless; not really angry but cynical and disenchanted.

At Samizdata, Johnathan Pearce also regrets O’Rourke’s death:

I met Mr O’Rourke about a decade ago, in what was the aftermath of the 2008 financial smash. He was charming company (my wife was bowled over by him – you have to watch these silver-tongued Irishmen) and retained the fizz that I recall from his coruscating book, Republican Party Reptile. I read that, I think, in around 1989, and then got my hands on anything he wrote. When he became a traveling correspondent for Rolling Stone magazine (a fact that today strikes one as impossible, such is the tribalism of our culture), I followed his columns closely. Parliament of Whores, written in the early 1990s and on the cusp of the Bill Clinton decade, stands the test of time as a brilliantly funny takedown of Big Government. Then came classics such as Eat The Rich and All The Trouble In The World.

I don’t quite think he kept the standard of searing wit + commentary at that level into the later 90s and into the current century. He did “serious stuff” with an amusing turn, such as a fine book about Adam Smith […] and could turn on the brilliance, but I think some of the energy had fallen off. He was a Dad with all the responsibilities that brings, and younger and less funny and more aggressive voices began to dominate the noise level in the public square. (Or maybe that is a sign that I am getting old, ahem.) O’Rourke, to the anger of some, wasn’t a Trump fan, and said so. He moved quite more explicitly libertarian, having a gig at the CATO Institute think tank. By his early 70s, I did not read or hear much of his doings, and that was a shame in the age of Greta, Cancel Culture, “Save the NHS”, Great Resets, Chinese nastiness and the Keto Diet. (I am kidding slightly about the last point.)

P J O’Rourke’s death saddens me as much as did that of two other fine men whom I met over the years and who died from cancer over the past couple of years: Brian Micklethwait and Sir Roger Scruton. They were all very different men, but they shared a common love of liberty, a mischievous wit and a hatred of cant.

I think the first of his books I ever read was Republican Party Reptile, and my copy got a bit dog-eared from being lent out to many friends and acquaintances over the next few years. As I understand it, O’Rourke had children late in life, and it may have been one of the reasons that some of the character and energy of his earlier works are somewhat lacking in writings from the last fifteen years or so … there are few activities that can absorb energy like caring for young children (I love seeing my grand-nieces when they visit, but I’m totally knackered by the time we’re waving goodbye).