Eat the Rich

Economics is aptly known as ”the dismal science.” Can P.J. O’Rourke make it funny? Not really, and he can’t make the by-now axiomatic superiority of market economies to monolithic state-planned systems a revelation, either. It doesn’t matter. Though the places he visits in Eat the Rich are meant as one-chapter illustrations of his treatise on economics (”Bad Capitalism: Albania… Good Socialism: Sweden… How to Have the Worst of Both Worlds: Shanghai, etc.”), they’re on the same map as the caricatured destinations of his previous travel collections (Holidays in Hell, All the Trouble in the World), and he remains the most insular, prejudiced, comically acute travel writer since Evelyn Waugh made his bilious way through Africa and the Middle East back in the 1930s. B+