The great shark hunt: Strange tales from a strange time Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

The great shark hunt: Strange tales from a strange time Book

In addition to being a testament to the undeniably beatifying properties of American excess--literary, political, chemical, you name it--Hunter Thompson is the high priest of the ad hominem attack. Anyone unlucky enough to get in the way of his satirical sledgehammer will end up with soup for brains. Still, even Thompson needs a good villain to get properly lathered up; that's why he peaked simultaneously with America's 37th president, Richard Milhous Nixon. Tricky Dick was Thompson's dark-jowled, pale-calved Muse, and with his departure Thompson seemed to lose his place a bit. Swatting flies with a baseball bat. You need look no further for this writer's best: this collection of pieces, first published in 1979, spans all of Thompson's primo era, including short pieces and selections from longer works. The Great Shark Hunt sports a few articles filed by a pre-Gonzo Hunter S. Thompson, which show flickers of passion but no real fire; the first experiments with the author's drug-fueled brand of journalism at the Kentucky Derby; and finally the gigs that made him an American institution, in Las Vegas and on the 1972 campaign trail. Thompson's style is so unique that a reader is tempted to think that he leapt, fully formed, into Gonzohood. However, along with the crazy, careening prose itself, one of the auxiliary pleasures of The Great Shark Hunt is the map that it gives of Thompson's ascent (or descent, if you prefer) from the workaday hyperbole of sports writing to the hell-blast vigor of his later work. The drugs are, by and large, a distraction--lifestyle points that get in the way of the genuinely perceptive journalism that Thompson created. (But they are there, always, and in quantity.) If you're looking for insight into the underbelly of America, Hunter S. Thompson is your best and only guide, and The Great Shark Hunt is an excellent place to begin the grim safari. --Michael GerberRead More

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  • Product Description

    'Well ...yes, and here we go again' - Dr Hunter S. Thompson. Indeed we do. Here, in one chunky volume, is the best of gonzo, from Private Thompson in trouble with the air force, to the devastating portrait of the ageing Muhammad Ali, taking in the Kentucky Derby, Freak Power in the Rockies, Nixon in '68, McGovern in '72, Fear and Loathing at the Watergate, Jimmy Carter and the Great Leap of Faith - and much more. This is an indispensable compendium of decadence, depravity and horse-sense. 'Hunter Thompson elicits the same kind of admiration one would feel for a streaker at Queen Victoria's funeral' - William F. Buckley. 'No other reporter reveals how much we have to fear and loathe, yet does it so hilariously. Now that the dust of the sixties has settled, his hallucinated vision strikes one as having been the sanest' - Nelson Algren.

  • 0445045965
  • 9780445045965
  • Hunter S Thompson
  • Fawcett Popular Library
  • Paperback (Book)
  • 704
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