I guess I'll pick this one up

Jean Jennings looks at P.J. O'Rourke's latest collection of essays, Driving Like Crazy:

I was out of work and landed an interview with Mr. Davis in August 1980. It would be wise, I thought, to actually read the mag [Car and Driver] before I barged in for the face-to-face. So I went to the library and checked one out. This is where you Google "library check out magazines" to figure out what in God's name I just wrote. Google will not explain that the magazines in libraries are older than the ones moldering in dentist offices; the one I found was a little more than a year behind — July 1979 — but fell open to "Palm Beach Weekend," an O'Rourke classic in which he reviewed an Aston Martin Volante. These are the lines I remember thirty years later: "If you're paying $70,000 for an automobile, you obviously don't have the sense God gave seafood," and, on why he wasn't driving the wheels off of it, "How'd you like to inform the Ziff-Davis Publishing Company that it just bought $70,000 worth of burgundy freezer wrap?" We'll just skip the line that made me wonder what kind of magazine I was about to walk into, the line that almost shut down the post office with incoming hate mail. In fact, it could be why "Palm Beach Weekend" is the one classic that didn't make it into P.J.'s newly published, precious archive of some of the best automotive road-trip insanity ever written.