J. O’Rourke has written nineteen books on subjects as diverse as politics and cars and etiquette and economics. Parliament of Whores and Give War a Chance both reached #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. He is a regular panelist on NPR’s Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me,a contributing writer for the Washington Post editorial page, and the editor in chief of the free web magazine American Consequences. He lives in rural New England, as far away from the things he writes about as he can get.

 In his new book, A CRY FROM THE FAR MIDDLE:  Dispatches from a Divided Land, the man who has covered wars in the Middle East, Central America, the Balkans, and other places around the world is now confronting the political battles at home.   

  “While this book was being written in 2019,” he writes in a Pre-Preface that was completed just before the book went to press in June, “America was deep in an era of idiot populism and hooligan partisanship. Our country was engaged in a sort of socio-political Peloponnesian War. That is, we were in the midst of a long, confusing, tedious, useless, foolish conflict that threatened to destroy democracy and left ordinary commonsensical people feeling ‘It’s all Greek to me.’”