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Very early on in All the Trouble in the World (Grove/Atlantic; 340 pages; $22), P.J. O'Rourke's look at "the lighter side" of overpopulation, famine, ecological disaster and other global environmental woes, the reader begins to wonder whether somewhere between writing Republican Party Reptile and this latest effort the author suffered a stroke. Left intact are O'Rourke's accustomed descriptive flair and facility for throwaway lines -- " 'dying like flies' is not a simile you'd use in Somalia. The flies wax prosperous and lead full lives." Gone, however, is any faculty for building an argument...
...Rourke serves up his witticisms with plenty of statistics that support his views, and a reader might reasonably assume that he has undertaken exhaustive research. In fact, the book betrays a disturbing ignorance. The World Bank, for instance, does not squander money by making loans to poor nations "that will be paid back when the Pope sits shiva." Were it only so -- then the bank might stop making its ecologically dubious investments. Much of the recent criticism leveled at the institution has been that it makes too much money from those loans, not too little...
After solidifying film connections in Mexico, she headed to New York to try her luck in the now-ballooning world of filmmaking. She worked a graveyard shift as a legal proof-reader on Wall Street, an occupation apparently popular with the starving artists of Manhattan. During this period that she got lucky when she came across a flyer advertising help wanted for Jonathan Demme's Swimming to Cambodia; she took a volunteer position on the editing squad. Demme obviously recognized her talent, because not long after he selected her as assistant editor for "Silence of the Lambs." Her experience impressed...
With Lake, O'Brien manages what he does best, which is to find the boy scout in the foot soldier, and the foot soldier in every reader. No one writes better about the fear and homesickness of a boy adrift amid what he cannot understand, be it combat or love. O'Brien shows us Wade as a lonely, pudgy 10- year-old, practicing magic tricks before the mirror, hoping to conjure a callous father's love out of thin air. "The mirror made his father smile all the time. The mirror made the vodka bottles vanish from their hiding place...
...WEEKLY READER...