American Conservative editor Dan McCarthy, in a University Bookman roundup of summer reading, made this comment:
I’ve kicked off the summer with James Bovard’s memoir, Public-Policy Hooligan. The Iowa-born, Virginia-reared libertarian hellraiser recounts his youth in Front Royal and Blacksburg as he grows from “a protein pill-popping weightlifting champion into a library-addicted philosophy devotee.” Bovard hitchhikes across two continents before winding up in Washington, D.C. Along the way there are pipe bombs, a plan for a conscript Congress, more than one knife-wielding sex-crazed woman, and life lessons from the author’s stints “as a Santa Claus, peach picker, highway department flagman, Kelly Girl typist, lawn mower, demented Beatrix Potter rabbit, census taker, freight unloader, construction worker, and Harvard Business School-certified snow shoveler.” More practically, there are lessons on how to live as a freelance journalist, the daunting profession that has been Bovard’s lifelong calling.
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