Fear and Loathing in America

Reviews

“Hunter Thompson is the most creatively crazy and vulnerable of the New Journalists. His ideas are brilliant and honorable and valuable…the literary equivalent of cubism: all rules are broken.”

“There are only two adjectives writers care about anymore…brilliant and outrageous…and Hunter Thompson has a freehold on both of them.”

“His hallucinated vision strikes one as having been, after all, the sanest.”

He amuses; he frightens; he flirts with doom. His achievement is substantial.”

“A vital, deliriously erratic force in journalism…Reading Hunter Thompson is like using gasoline for aftershave—bracing…These untidy letters are welcome, showing us as they do a great American original in his lair.”

“Thompson was after what F. Scott Fitzgerald called ‘the high white note,’ and this collection is a symphony of such celestial peaks of excitement, humor, and wisdom.”

“Thompson should be recognized for contributing some of the clearest, most bracing, and fearless analysis of the possibilities and failures of American democracy in the past century. Reading through this latest collection of letters, one cannot but agree with him as he proclaims, ‘I am one of the best writers currently using the English language as both musical instrument and political weapon.’”

“What we have here is vintage Hunter S. Thompson, a literary orgy of wicked irreverence.”

“The collection…stands as an extremely valuable historical document and a testament to Thompson’s lasting importance as both journalist and stylist.”

“Thompson altered permanently the nature of political journalism by injecting into his reportage the personal and the pathological, and this second volume of letters reads like rehearsals for his more public utterances, almost every page ringing with the sound of gunfire, revving motorcycle engines and partying that began at a level where most partying ends. What may surprise readers is the sweetness of much of the writing. While Thompson's correspondents include a virtual who's who of the era, from Tom Wolfe and Kurt Vonnegut to Jimmy Carter and George McGovern, he wrote to his fans like a kind if slightly deranged uncle, trying to convince one not to join the Hell's Angels, offering a second help with her term paper. Despite the occasional lollipop, however, Thompson's strong suit is still invective, of which he remains the unsurpassed master.”

“Hunter’s life and times are our life and times, and, oh, how wicked we’ve been.”

“A biting self-portrait of a comic genius, a man whose greatest creation of all was himself.”

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