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.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - Hunter S. Thompson

Re-read this one as a break between some other books, after I watched the first half of the movie on TV late one night. Still a personal favourite, even with its flaws and shortcomings. If you want to understand what happened to the '60's - how peace and love became the '70's - then use this book as guide.

"There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda .... You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning ....

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simplyprevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave ....

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark —that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."

Fear and Loathing at 40

One of the best books about the 60's, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, turns 40 today.  If anyone wants to understand how the 60's turned into the 70's (and then into the 80's), they should read Fear and Loathing, which explains it better than any history or sociology book.

"There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning….Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting – on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark – that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."

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