The Pope's appearance on Oprah to promote his book; letters of recommendation for O. J. Simpson's New York condo application; a review of Peter Benchley's new book, Gills, about a vengeful Dolly Varden trout; the starship Enterprise's most daring and difficult assignment - programming its VCR; and several dozen other delightful New Yorker parodies, satires, and pastiches are all collected here. Buckley has occasionally been the source of controversy, as when he perpetrated a highly efficient and successful hoax claiming that the Kremlin was about to auction off the embalmed remains of Lenin in order to raise hard currency. A review he wrote of one of Tom Clancy's novels so infuriated the novelist that he launched fax cruise missiles at Buckley - providing Buckley with ammunition for his counterstrike. When not annoying the Russian Interior Ministry or megaselling thriller writers, Buckley embarks on unusual adventures of his own: steaming up the Amazon in the company of billionaires and deposed European royalty, spelunking in Mayan caves, landing on the deck of the U.S.S. Nimitz, and hurtling about the wild blue yonder with the Thunderbirds (see "How I Went Nine Gs in an F-16 and Only Threw Up Five Times"). FROM THE CRITICS Publishers Weekly The author of Thank You for Smoking has put together more than 65 bits and pieces of journeyman work (much of it very amusing indeed) from sources ranging from the New Yorker to the New York Times to Forbes to the Portsmith Abbey Alumni magazine. Touched on, usually quite briefly, are subjects such as mad cow disease (could the animals be used to counteract illegal emigration from Mexico?), drunken Yale undergraduates (a growth industry, it seems), presidential debates (which, he observes, would be improved if all involved had three martinis before things got under way) and the Unabomber (the next client of O.J.'s dream team?). There are also accounts of hoaxes successfully perpetrated by Buckley, including the well-publicized "rumor" that an impoverished Russia plans to auction off Lenin's embalmed corpse. The section called "Homage to Tom Clancy" is typical of the book's variety. It begins with a none-too-serious profile of the author written soon after the success of The Hunt for Red October, followed by a parody of Clancy as a U.S. senator, then a savage review of Debt of Honor (Clancy is "the James Fenimore Cooper of his day, which is to say the most successful bad writer of his generation"), followed by an exchange of actual faxes between an unamused Clancy and a puckish Buckley. As a comic, Buckley frequently suffers from the Saturday Night Live syndrome: his ideas are often funnier than his punch lines. But readers hell-bent on amusing themselves will find laughs enough here. Illustrations not seen by PW. (Mar.) Library Journal This collection of magazine articles by Buckley ranges from satire to introspection. In one of his works the author describes the frustrations of Captain Kirk (from Star Trek) who faces his greatest challenge in programming a VCR. In another he examines his envy of Vietnam veterans. While his articles on Tom Clancy, O.J. Simpson, and Oprah Winfrey are hilarious, others are dated and seem a little too precious. Buckley is a skilled writer, and his insights are pertinent and amusing. Narrator Lloyd James does a commendable job in capturing the many different nuances of these articles, e.g., he's a very convincing Ensign Chekov.  Random House Publishing Group 0-679-45233-8 / 9780679452331
Hardcover VG/Very Good  New York 

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