One of the funniest books I ever read. Gave me a new perspective about most of life. And his Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail helped me understand politics and political campaigns. I did not learn to appreciate everything he wrote about but he captured the angst, the subtle looks or words, the foolishness of real people in all his books. I wonder what he would write about our political situation today - I would probably laugh. Hunter Thompson was a wordsmith, a person who could use words in distinct and creative ways to help me, the reader, understand more and more deeply what he was writing about. RIP

Wow, pero que divertido es violar a menores bajo sumisión química, aterrorizar a las camareras que están haciendo su trabajo, joderse el cerebro con drogas y estafar a los demás porque son todos unos “comemierdas", pero ay tengo excusa para ejercer toda esta violencia, mi sociedad es imperfecta, pobre hombre roto. Envejece mal.

You know, if this was the first of Mr. Thompson's books I had read, I never would have picked up another one. As far as I can tell, this is one of his weaker ones and is really the most well-known only for the long, droning drug bullshit. Reading drug writing is about as interesting is watching paint dry. There are little kernals of hilarity (because he's a fantastic writer who is able to describe pitch perfectly the bizarre ineptitude of the human experience) which saves it from being snoringly dull. I mean, he gets on a plane to Denver by accident and decides to attempt to purchase an albino Doberman because "Since I was already here, I thought I might as well pick up a vicious dog." I love his use of language, his token words that he throws around *such as calling various people swine*. I love his misanthropic disposition that saves him from being a misogynist (god probably didn't spell that right but I'm tired) due to the simple fact that he views all of mankind as pretty much an entire wasteland. I have to say I adore Mr. Thompson. I didn't hate this, but I didn't love it either. I'll just pretend I read A Generation of Swine instead. He's more interesting as a political junkie, rather than just a junkie.

In 1971, Hunter S. Thompson (in the book: “Raoul Duke”) undertook two trips to Las Vegas with Oscar Zeta Acosta (“Dr. Gonzo”), an attorney and Chicano activist. “Fear and Loathing” reports these trips in classic Gonzo-manner, meaning that it is told from a radically subjective perspective in which fiction and reality are intertwined until they become undistinguishable. But what does reality mean anyway when it is depicted by someone who is constantly on all kinds of substances, dazed and hallucinating?

This book is not only about two people who take tons of drugs while being on reporting trips to the “Mint 400” desert race and, of all places, to the “National District Attorneys Association's Conference on Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs” (in case you`re wondering: This is fact, those guys have actually been there while on mescaline). In Vegas, the plastic, consumerist capital of escapism and greed, Thompson contemplates the current state of the American Dream. There´s a reason why in a famous photograph of him, Thompson only half-mockingly draped an American flag over his shoulders: Mourning the assumed death of this Dream by pointing out what`s wrong is the first step to resuscitate it.

“Still humping the American Dream, that vision of the Big Winner somehow emerging from the last-minute pre-dawn chaos of a stale Vegas casino. (…) Calm down. Learn to enjoy losing”, Raoul Duke ruminates bitterly when watching people in a casino. The last movement that dreamt of a better America, the hippie community, had by then vanished. And according to Duke, rightly so: “All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours, too.”

In Nixon´s America, there was not much left of the spirit of the Sixties: “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.”

Nixon´s war on drugs helped to discredit the left who opposed the Vietnam war and, as Nixon`s chief strategist John Ehrlichman explained more than twenty years later, it was designed to frame public perception so people would associate hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. In the Sixties, Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey saw psychoactive drugs as a means to expand consciousness. Now, Raoul Duke takes them to make life more bearable, as “he who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.” Also, people take different drugs than back then, as Duke observes: “Consciousness expansion went out with LBJ…and it is worth noting, historically, that downers came with Nixon.” In Duke`s opinion, this is indicative of the change in the public psyche.

Hunter S. Thompson revolutionized the whole idea of journalism and reporting, he was a passionate political author, and his fascinating personality is shining through every page of this book. I advise you to read it. “Do it now: pure Gonzo journalism.”

(If you want to learn more about how Gonzo relates to the Beat Generation, you can listen to our podcast special (in German) here.)

Reading The Footloose American: Following the Hunter S. Thompson Trail Across South America all but required that this be the 5th book in my "reading challenge" (in 2014 I pledges to read 10 books I'd read at least 20 years ago). I picked up a well-worn copy at the library.

Since its publication there have been many drug inspired poems, rants and narratives, but Thompson can't be beat. He's the gold standard of the genre. His prose, narrative and attitude are consistent from paragraph to punctuation.

Thompson and his attorney are out to discover the American Dream in Las Vegas before the city went family friendly. Stoned on more alcohol and drugs than any human can survive, the pair zooms across the desert in the giant luxury cars of the day, running up hotel bills, damaging property and stealing tons of soap. There is little to no continuity in their experience as they move from place to place, meeting and abusing people as only addicts can.

It is the heart of irony they attend a convention of District Attorneys and law enforcement personnel who specialize in drug laws.

While it was written in the 1970's (with Nixon-era content) the style is that associated with the 1960's. It reads in a way that is still fresh and stylish after 40+ years. My read ("back then") provoked some out loud laughing. This time around it provoked a few smiles and "WOW" moments.

I wonder how millennials, if they were to read this, would relate to the imagery. There are giant cars, a reliance on pay phones, complex recording equipment (state of art for then), 29 cent hamburgers, and $2/per day rental car insurance. The many allusions to 60's/70's music create the backdrop for those who lived through this era; do they enrich the reading experience of young people? Would young people today recognize names like Melvin Belli, Sonny Barger or Caryl Chessman? or even Bob Zimmerman, Spiro Agnew or John Mitchell?

There are recounts of conversations all too common for the era. My favorite one (I've heard hundreds of variations) was on p. 145 with Thompson, "his attorney" with a DA from Georgia. The illustrations by Ralph Steadman match the fear and loathing content.

Anyone who wants a nostalgia trip to a glamorized drug life (that no one really led) will want to read (or maybe re-read) this book.

I recently went to Las Vegas for the first, and probably only, time in my life. I hadn't read this book in years, and previously, it hadn't even been my favorite Hunter S. Thompson work. Thompson is dearly missed by many people, and on a personal level, I miss him deeply. He spoke to a true astonishment at the complete, unrelenting fuckedupedness of America and her politics, and he did it with a bite that was deserved and unmatched. He probably could have been a very rich super-novelist of popular, uninspired filth. He probably could have been a brilliant novelist of any kind. But he chose to do what he did, and he did it better than any of his generation. Like Mark Twain, he chronicled American stupidity in the tongue of his generation, and he captured it perfectly, from the insanity of the drug experience to the depravity of American politics. For years, no work of his stood out to me as much as Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 or the Gonzo letters. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, to me, wasn't his best work. Then I went to Vegas. Suddenly, all the subtle differences between this and his other work made sense, and I realized that he had captured the true tackiness of the truest tacky city on the entire planet (though Dubai with their fucking Island fantasies are likely to take over soon). Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas IS Las Vegas. It's a nightmare, a joke, a blunder of comical, cosmically-fucked proportions. It's not Sin City. It's where Sin goes to die when it's embarrassed for itself. It's where families go on vacations with ten-year-olds, children who get handed fliers for prostitutes. It's the living, pulsing, filthing embodiment of the Holy Dollar. It's sensory overload on a scale drugs can't equal, a place where you almost have to take a brimful of Valium and a pint of ether to feel normal and not feel utterly ashamed at the state of the human condition. It would make you want to blow your brains out if it weren't so goddamned fun, even if you're gay, you hate gambling and hookers make your brain itch. Yet you never, ever feel like it is evil or subversive or curious in any way. It's just about a buck, and every other blink reminds you of it. This is a place where Hunter S. Thompson could easily mingle with a law enforcement convention and not get noticed. This is a place where a lawyer could leave you with a hotel bill. This is a place where no questions get asked because no answers would make sense, and the only thing profound about any of it is that you know, on a gut level, that all the oil used to produce all the plastic used to build that city no doubt funded an island shaped like Australia that was built off the coast of the UAE over the weekend. This novel will never cease to be important, and one day, as a cultural artifact of a forgotten culture from a forgotten nation, it will be one of the most important anthropological pieces in existence.

I wish he'd survived the Bush administration. We need this man.

NC

One of my juniors insisted I read this book; he basically shoved his copy in my hands. And I was like, sure, why not. It's a book I've always felt that I should like. I appreciate the theory behind gonzo journalism (since, I mean, when is ANY writing actually objective?), and I appreciate Thompson's anti-Nixon, anti-drugwar worldview. I can see my 20-year-old self being very into this story, (the word "story" being used loosely, of course).

But my 30-year-old self could not get into it. I tried! Sometimes it's funny (huge reptiles gnawing on people's necks, your grandma crawling up your leg with a knife in her mouth), but mostly, it's kind of gross, kind of offensive (I didn't even make it to the rape), and mostly just boring. I mean, nihilism is boring. Thompson's message is: The world is fucked, so we might as well get fucked up. And it's like, cool theory, bro, I used to be a teenager, too.

Thompson's characters, if that's what they are, revel in how much they can get away with in the most white-male way possible. I guess, you could argue that Fear and Loathing is the 70s' American Psycho, but American Psycho feels more honest in its satire. I don't know, man. There's just nothing here. Maybe it's just because I don't like slapstick.

First line: "We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold."

This book is labeled as journalism / nonfiction. I am not sure that I believe it is fully either, but it is none the less a very interesting read.
"Fear and Loathing" claims to be a "savage journey to the heart of the American Dream" but I find it hard to believe it was all that honest of a search if one set out to pursue it as Mr. Thompson and his attorney claim they were. There is more drug use and hallucinations in this text, then I hope, most are used to. However, that is an integral part of the book, and works for what seems to be Thompson's ultimate goal.
Although I don't approve of the lifestyle of its two main characters, they are in fact disgusting people, they are still intriguing, and I found the text to be an easy and enjoyable read. The last 100 pages are far superior to the first 100, as it is in the later half of the book that Mr. Thompson seems to be getting to his point.
The "American Dream" really lives in the hearts and minds of those who pursue it, and thus if the heart and mind pursuing it are not all that together, then the dream seems to be lost. This book is peopled with such characters. Most are fearful of the world that surrounds them, and most also loathe themselves and the world around them. The book is an interesting exploration of our self destructive tendencies, and how we are the biggest inhibitors of our own happiness. Thompson laments the lost spirit of the 60s in this text, all the while truthfully acknowledging the only people to blame for that are the very people who preached and practiced it.
Thompson has a very unique writing style. The man had talent and deserves to be praised for it. His sense of irony and wit are immensely enjoyable, and the prose fits the story and the personality of the text's main characters. These outrageous characters and circumstances come across as totally believable, and that perhaps is Thompson's greatest achievement with this book.

This book was crap. 204 pages of some dude staying completely wrecked. There was no point, I kept waiting for some deep meaning to come out of it but it never did. A complete waste of my time.

Ok, I get it. The world is nuts. But does that mean you have to be nuts to report about it? Over-the-top drug use. Well, he created "gonzo," but it could have been all told in a few pages. I slogged through because everyone talks about Hunter S. But why? Skip the book. Watch a movie instead. Much faster.

Hilarious and wild. A few years ago I tried to watch the movie version but turned it off because I wasn't liking it. I'm glad the book lives up to its reputation.

Τον Μάρτιο του 2010 διάβασα το "Μεθυσμένο Ημερολόγιο" του ίδιου τρελού συγγραφέα και από τις πρώτες λίγες σελίδες κατάλαβα ότι είχα να κάνω με κάτι το ξεχωριστό στην αμερικάνικη λογοτεχνία. Ακόμα παραμένει ένα από τα αγαπημένα μου βιβλία και δεν θα αργήσει η ώρα που θα το ξαναπιάσω στα χέρια μου. Τώρα, όσον αφορά το κλασικό καλτ αριστούργημα που μόλις τελείωσα, τα λόγια είναι περιττά. Πριν καν το αρχίσω ήμουν σίγουρος ότι θα του βάλω πέντε αστεράκια και μετά την ανάγνωσή του επιβεβαιώθηκα πανηγυρικά.

Μιλάμε για ένα επικό τριπάρισμα, ένα χρονικό μαστούρας και παράνοιας, με τον αφηγητή της ιστορίας μας, τον gonzo δημοσιογράφο Ραούλ Ντιουκ, aka Χάντερ Σ. Τόμσον, να ταξιδεύει παρέα με τον δικηγόρο του με μια ξεσκέπαστη σεβρολέ, γεμάτη κάθε είδους ναρκωτικά, με προορισμό το Λας Βέγκας. Εκεί ο Ντιουκ θα πρέπει να καλύψει δημοσιογραφικά έναν αγώνα μοτοσικλετών Μιντ 400, για λογαριασμό ενός περιοδικού, και αργότερα να παρακολουθήσει την Εθνική Συνδιάσκεψη Περιφερειακών Εισαγγελέων κατά των ναρκωτικών. Πραγματικός σκοπός των δυο τους, όμως, είναι να ανακαλύψουν το λεγόμενο Αμερικάνικο Όνειρο και να ζήσουν λίγες μέρες γεμάτες ναρκωτικά, αλκοόλ και παράνοια, φλερτάροντας επικίνδυνα με την καταστροφή.

Τι να πω. Έχουν περάσει πάνω από σαράντα χρόνια από τότε που γράφηκε, αλλά δεν γέρασε καθόλου. Η ιστορία δεν χρειάζεται και ιδιαίτερη ανάλυση, είναι αυτή που είναι, εντελώς τρελή και μέσα στην μαστούρα. Βασικά προτερήματα του βιβλίου είναι φυσικά η απίστευτη, χειμαρρώδης, ειρωνική, σατιρική γραφή, που μέσα στην παράνοιά της καταφέρνει να είναι άκρως ευκολοδιάβαστη, η τρέλα που διαπερνάται μέσω της πλοκής και των χαρακτήρων, οι περιγραφές του παρανοϊκού Λας Βέγκας, της πόλης-βασίλισσας του αμερικάνικου τζόγου, και, φυσικά, η κριτική της αμερικάνικης κοινωνίας εκείνης της εποχής, με φόντο τον πόλεμο του Βιετνάμ και την έξαρση της χρήσης ναρκωτικών και διαφόρων άλλων επικίνδυνων ουσιών.

Φυσικά το βιβλίο δεν είναι για όλα τα γούστα, δεν απευθύνεται σε όλους, η γραφή είναι τέτοια που μπορεί να ικανοποιήσει τους περισσότερους, όμως οι εμπειρίες των δυο πρωταγωνιστών, η ιστορία, η τρέλα της πλοκής, δεν είναι για τον οποιοδήποτε. Εγώ πάντως ξετρελάθηκα και βρήκα την κάθε σελίδα του βιβλίου εκπληκτική. Και, επιτέλους, τώρα μπορώ να απολαύσω και την καλτ ταινία του Terry Gilliam, η οποία βασίζεται στο βιβλίο αυτό, όντας όσο γίνεται καλύτερα προετοιμασμένος για την ψυχεδέλεια και την παράνοιά της.