Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone: The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson - Hunter S. Thompson

I finished this book the same day a woman pepper sprayed people at a Wal-Mart to get at an X-box during a Black Friday sale. Thompson would have been at home in this madness. He also would have recognized the incident a few weeks at Berkeley when a campus cop causally pepper sprayed a line of student protesters.

This collection stretches from the beginning days at Rolling Stone all the way to a few months before his death - a piece about the Bush re-election victory in 2004, and Thompson's opinion that he would rather have voted for Nixon, his arch-nemesis, than Bush (perhaps the harshest indictment of the presidency of George W Bush ever given)
The cliche would be to say that we need a voice like Thompson now, but it could never happen. You can draw connections between Thompson's style and bloggers (personal, argumentative, opinionated, vitriolic) but Thompson put himself in the story by going to the centre of action (instead of sitting back and commenting on what's happening) and he wrote long, rambling pieces that required heavy editing and don't fit nicely onto the screen of an i-pad.

In-between the pieces are letters between Thompson and Jann Wenner, some of which hint at what might have been. One of the great lost books is Thompson's lost Vietnam novel. Some of the dispatches are collected here, with Thompson bunkered down in a hotel as the Viet Cong approach, collecting ammunition and trying to teach two other journalists how to to use a walkie talkie system for when the walls are breached. Vietnam was pure gonzo, and it takes a madman like Thompson to make sense of the madness.