From Publishers Weekly
"The years that were covered in these letters," says Thompson, "were like riding on a bullet train... with no sleep and no wires to hang on to." Apparently he hung onto his typewriter, though, churning out not only his drugged-up, wigged-out road book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and similarly outrageous articles for Rolling Stone but also for letter after lengthy letter, in the same white-hot, turbo-charged style. 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. It's been 30 years since his series of sulfurous missives to a local Colorado TV station for showing only "the cheapest, meanest swill" and to mail-order companies that dared send the journalist from hell what he deemed shabby merchandise, but surely Thompson's name still provokes shudders at the Alaska Sleeping Bag Company and elsewhere. B&w photos. (Dec. 13) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
The earlier volume of Thompson letters, The Proud Highway (1997), surprised many readers with its revealing glimpses into the making of a notorious journalist; moreover, those letters did not disappoint for they are as audacious as their author. With this second of a planned three-volume set of letters, the original gonzo journalist's "testament to his life and times" covers the period in which Thompson's seminal pieces were published or, at least, well into the making. During this period, Thompson was reporting on the political scene for Rolling Stone , which would yield his highly original road book, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1972); falling deeper into politics and increasing his knowledge of that world, which he pulled together for Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ; and running his own crazy political race for sheriff in Aspen, Colorado, where, as publicity has it, he still lives in a "fortified compound" (shades of Garry Trudeau's Duke in his Doonesbury comic strip; incidentally, readers discover letters here, too, that reveal that at one point Thompson considered suing Trudeau for libel). Often the correspondence is so eventful that it impresses one as being fictitious, as with the letters between Thompson and Oscar Zeta Acosta, the Chicano activist/lawyer and model for Thompson's 300-pound Samoan attorney, Dr. Gonzo, in Las Vegas . And then there are the painful letters between writer and publisher, particularly Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone and Jim Silberman of Random House, that trace the hard road many original writers travel to merely survive. The cast of characters is impressive, politicians such as Gary Hart and George McGovern, friends and colleagues such as cartoonist Ralph Steadman and writer William Kennedy. Summarily, Hunter's life and times are our life and times, and, oh, how wicked we've been. Bonnie Smothers
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Review
Christopher Buckley The New York Times Book Review Reading Hunter Thompson is like using gasoline for aftershave -- bracing.


Review
Christopher BuckleyThe New York Times Book ReviewReading Hunter Thompson is like using gasoline for aftershave -- bracing.


Review
Christopher Buckley The New York Times Book Review Reading Hunter Thompson is like using gasoline for aftershave -- bracing.


Book Description
Brazen, incisive, and outrageous as ever, Hunter S. Thompson is back with another astonishing volume of his private correspondence, the highly anticipated follow-up to The Proud Highway. When that first book of letters appeared in 1997, Time pronounced it "deliriously entertaining"; Rolling Stone called it "brilliant beyond description"; and The New York Times celebrated its "wicked humor and bracing political conviction." Spanning the years between 1968 and 1976, these never-before-published letters show Thompson building his legend: running for sheriff in Aspen, Colorado; creating the seminal road book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas; twisting political reporting to new heights for Rolling Stone; and making sense of it all in the landmark Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72. To read Thompson's dispatches from these years -- addressed to the author's friends, enemies, editors, and creditors, and such notables as Jimmy Carter, Tom Wolfe, and Kurt Vonnegut -- is to read a raw, revolutionary eyewitness account of one of the most exciting and pivotal eras in American history.


About the Author
Hunter S. Thompson's books include Hell's Angels, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72, The Proud Highway, Better Than Sex, and The Rum Diary. A regular contributor to various national and international publications, Thompson now lives in a fortified compound near Aspen, Colorado.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Brazen, incisive, and outrageous as ever, Hunter S. Thompson is back with another astonishing volume of his private correspondence, the highly anticipated follow-up to The Proud Highway. When that first book of letters appeared in 1997, Time pronounced it "deliriously entertaining"; Rolling Stone called it "brilliant beyond description"; and The New York Times celebrated its "wicked humor and bracing political conviction."

Spanning the years between 1968 and 1976, these never-before-published letters show Thompson building his legend: running for sheriff in Aspen, Colorado; creating the seminal road book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas; twisting political reporting to new heights for Rolling Stone; and making sense of it all in the landmark Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72. To read Thompson's dispatches from these years—addressed to the author's friends, enemies, editors, and creditors, and such notables as Jimmy Carter, Tom Wolfe, and Kurt Vonnegut—is to read a raw, revolutionary eyewitness account of one of the most exciting and pivotal eras in American history.

Provocative and revealing, Fear and Loathing in America cements Hunter S. Thompson's reputation as one of the great literary and cultural icons of our time—the only man alive to have ridden with both the Hell's Angels and Richard Nixon.

FROM THE CRITICS

New York Times Book Review - Christopher Buckley

Reading Hunter Thompson is like using gasoline for aftershave—bracing.

Book Magazine

With a little tweaking here and a whole lot of pruning there, this 800-plus-page doorstop of a letters collection could pass as an engaging revival of an anachronistic form: the epistolary novel. Its protagonist is one Hunter Stockton Thompson, a maverick journalist who has parlayed the success of his book-length account of riding with the Hell's Angels into a series of provocative, increasingly high-profile assignments for prominent national magazines. Looming large over the writer's tortured psyche is the prospect of a second book, an impossibly ambitious tome with the working title "The Death of the American Dream." The title is the only thing that works, as he relates in dozens of letters charting its lack of progress. The book doesn't exist, not even in Thompson's mind. It is both his sophomore jinx and his Great White Whale, an obsession that he realizes could either elevate his reputation as the outlaw sage of American socio-surrealism or reduce him to the authorial equivalent of one-hit-wonder. The more committed that his editor becomes to the project, the more Thompson realizes that everything he not only writes but thinks, breathes, eats and ingests could be subsumed within the topic. "I have no idea what I'm going to write, but if nothing else I expect to learn a lot, and that's the only part of writing I enjoy," he explains in a 1968 letter to Sue Grafton, a former Louisville, Kentucky, neighbor and devoted fan (now a bestselling mystery novelist). "The actual work—the typewriter horrors—I approach with fear and loathing." The O. Henryish twist, of course, is that the letters he's been writing to avoid writing the book are, in fact,that book. Here is the death of the American dream; eventually Thompson's twisted idealism turns to cynicism and his main concern becomes haggling over expense checks. His primary topic becomes himself, the icon as caricature, more famous for not writing than for anything he has written in the quarter-century after this collection ends. As with the earlier volume of Thompson's coming-of-age letters, the sheer bulk of his correspondence makes it a marvel that he ever found time to write anything else (and editor Douglas Brinkley assures that for every letter included, another five were omitted). There are letters that he acknowledges are "drafts for later things—test-runs of a sort," such as the voluminous exchanges with editor Jim Silberman over the American Dream project. There are letters that give Thompson's take on "new journalism" (which he insisted was older than Jack Kerouac), "Gonzo journalism" (a blurring of fact and fiction to achieve a truer truth) and Raoul Duke (his surrealistic alter ego, who could tread even further beyond the bounds of responsible journalism than Thompson dared). There are letters offering assistance to various liberal politicians—from Eugene McCarthy and Teddy Kennedy to Jimmy Carter—and there are others concerning his unlikely bonds with Richard Nixon and Pat Buchanan. Then there are hundreds of pages of letters chronicling the rise and fall of his relationship with Rolling Stone, with the magazine's publisher, Jann Wenner, playing Felix to Thompson's Oscar. Through this cataclysmic period in modern American history—from Vietnam through Watergate—most of Thompson's concerns are variations on a theme of "Where's the money?" If Wenner really canceled the writer's insurance after sending him to southeast Asia and refused to cover his expenses on a London assignment, such treatment was unconscionable, though we're never given the magazine's side of the story. One senses that these two made each other's reputation and that they deserve each other. Yet Rolling Stone was by no means the only magazine where Thompson felt persecuted. Take his description in 1971 of working on assignment for Sports Illustrated, then largely considered something of a writer's paradise: "I hate to give those doomed corporate castratos a good, first-rate piece & watch them cut it up for captions. I understand perfectly why they can't use it as an article: It's too rude & weird—but I hate to just shrug it off like a pound of used meat-writing that didn't fit SI's bridge-club format & so had to be butchered down like offal." In the early years documented in this collection, there is much to admire about the writer beyond the outrageousness of his prose. There's an almost heroic dimension to his moral code as he castigates a New York Times editor for assigning a piece to him when he didn't really want a Hunter Thompson piece, when he refuses to accept a much-needed $500 to write a ten-word blurb for a novel he deems offensive and when he advises a young fan who wants to follow the Hell's Angels to find his own path ("You sound like you have more sense than any six Angels I can think of, and I can't quite understand why you want to defer to them"). Soon enough, however, the writer who was once so fully engaged with the world seems to retreat into a world of one. Ultimately, these years of letters start to feel like dog years to the reader, who slogs through them in retrospect. "I've always considered writing the most hateful kind of work," confesses Thompson. "I suspect it's a little like fucking, which is only fun for amateurs. Old whores don't do much giggling." When the threatened third and final volume of letters arrives, don't expect a ton a giggles. —Don McLeese

Publishers Weekly

"The years that were covered in these letters," says Thompson, "were like riding on a bullet train... with no sleep and no wires to hang on to." Apparently he hung onto his typewriter, though, churning out not only his drugged-up, wigged-out road book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and similarly outrageous articles for Rolling Stone but also for letter after lengthy letter, in the same white-hot, turbo-charged style. 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. It's been 30 years since his series of sulfurous missives to a local Colorado TV station for showing only "the cheapest, meanest swill" and to mail-order companies that dared send the journalist from hell what he deemed shabby merchandise, but surely Thompson's name still provokes shudders at the Alaska Sleeping Bag Company and elsewhere. B&w photos. (Dec. 13) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

This is the second of a projected three-volume edition of Thompson's letters; the first, The Proud Highway (LJ 5/15/97), covered the period 1955-67. The voluminous correspondence of this "gonzo" journalist and author covers all of the important events of this tumultuous period in American life: the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, the Vietnam War, Richard Nixon's triumphs and ultimate disgrace, race relations, and more. These momentous events in American history are paralleled by the personal adventures of a writer who is angry, profane, and witty and yet also hopeful that his unique vision of America may eventually come to pass. Fans of Thompson will be thrilled to read this edited collection of letters; those who are not enthralled with his style and point of view may be less than enthusiastic to wade through this huge collection, which covers everything from world events to mundane, everyday episodes in his life. It also includes correspondence to Thompson, most notably letters by Oscar Acosta, the radical Chicano lawyer. For larger public and academic library collections.--Morris Hounion, New York City Technical Coll. Lib., Brooklyn Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Christopher Buckley - New York Times Book Review

This makes for some pretty electric reading, and for some not-so-electric reading. During the period covered in this collection, Thompson was a vital, deliriously erratic force in journalism . . . These untidy letters are welcome, showing us as they do a great American original in his lair.

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

His hallucinated vision strikes one as having been, after all, the sanest. — Nelson Algren

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.  — Kurt Jr. Vonnegut

He amuses; he frightens; he flirts with doom. His achievement is substantial.  — Garry Wills