P.J. O'Rourke is the perfect conservative writer for anyone afraid of being labeled a right-wing loony. From his hilarious (and hilariously unlikely) tenure as Rolling Stone's foreign correspondent to books like Parliament Of Whores and All The Trouble In The World, O'Rourke has repeatedly proven himself to be one of the rare political writers who's always worth reading. O'Rourke's rare talent is his ability to come across as both a perceptive journalist and a jerk, a quality absent from the countless reporters who are so eager to remain neutral that they end up negating the power of their subjects. For Eat The Rich, the man who once vacationed in Beirut and accompanied Guardian Angels on a midnight crack-house raid tackles the most powerful subject of them all: money. O'Rourke immediately owns up to his economic ignorance, and much of the book concerns his attempts to figure out the numerous fiscal woes the world faces. Divided neatly into chapters covering basic economics, Good (Sweden) and Bad (Cuba) Socialism, Good (Wall Street) and Bad (Albania) Capitalism, and complex transitional messes (Russia, Tanzania, Hong Kong, Shanghai), O'Rourke's book takes plenty of pot shots at countries that aren't prospering as well as our own. As expected, the best bits find O'Rourke stuck in places no one would go (like firearm-strewn Albania in the wake of the pyramid-scheme disaster), and predictably, Eat The Rich doesn't stray far from O'Rourke's support of a free-market economy. But he does make an honest effort to determine why a free-market economy doesn't always work from a neophyte's perspective. Considering that he could have quickly capitalized on current sex scandals for an easy paycheck, O'Rourke's pursuit of the tougher and less appealing story is commendable, even if the results are somewhat uneven.