Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas

Critics

• HST Goes Into the Darkness Share

  In a strange and ironic turn of events, two days after I wrote my review of his recent essay collection Hey Rube, Hunter S. Thompson took his own life at his home Owl Farm in Woody Creek, Colorado. So far there is very little hard news about Thompson ... (read full critics)

  blogcritics published on Mon, 21 Feb 2005

10 Reviews

• 1 person find this helpful

  A sort of instant trip (phisycal and mental) searching the American Dream made from the author and a friend, here named Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo. All begins, all of a sudden, covering (or trying to cover) a race in Nevada and the two friends (the journalist and his attorney). Problems begin when the ... (continue)

  A sort of instant trip (phisycal and mental) searching the American Dream made from the author and a friend, here named Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo. All begins, all of a sudden, covering (or trying to cover) a race in Nevada and the two friends (the journalist and his attorney). Problems begin when the two start buying so many drugs and alcohol able to kill a handful of marines and abusing. We see and listent to all the allucinated dreams and chats, men fooled, scared or ridiculed just for nothing. The story is splitted in two parts, with a Red Shark and a White Whale as cars and a number of hotels and casinoes that show us the best and the worst of a city, Las Vegas, full of good and evil, saint and sinners, often the second ones.
  Ralph Steadman's strange and allucinated illustrations help us to enter in the mood of these trips.

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  etnagigante said on Aug 17, 2010 about the Paperback edition | Add your feedback

• 

  "Reality Itself is Too Twisted"

  An insane "trip" unravels between California and Las Vegas. The story is told in first person by Raoul Duke, doctor in journalism, a.k.a. Hunter Stockton Thompson himself, and "his Samoan attorney", Dr. Gonzo.

  Our two junkie friends are almost constantly high on mescaline and other dope: ether, LSD ... (continue)

  An insane "trip" unravels between California and Las Vegas. The story is told in first person by Raoul Duke, doctor in journalism, a.k.a. Hunter Stockton Thompson himself, and "his Samoan attorney", Dr. Gonzo.

  Our two junkie friends are almost constantly high on mescaline and other dope: ether, LSD, cocaine and grass, not to mention spirits. The duo drives across Sin City, leaving behind various sorts of damages in hotels, clubs and even an anti-narco convention. They just do everything apart from the assigned task of writing an article.

  Fact of fiction, or maybe roman à clef, this is a tribute to the end of the Sixties and beginning of the Seventies.

  Memorable and worth quoting, the below "Wave Speech".
  The Speech arouses a whole bunch of thoughts & emotions.
  Such as: you can't really explain history to those who have not lived it. Such as: everything sooner or later will be flushed down the toilet bowl of the Universe.
  Try to read it aloud in his deep voice: American.

  Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run… but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant.…

  History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of "history" it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.
  […]

  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 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.

  Powerful.

  And take also this last one, less famous but nonetheless a precognition of our current twisted reality:

  Hallucinations are bad enough. But after a while you learn to cope with things like seeing your dead grandmother crawling up your leg with a knife in her teeth. Most acid fanciers can handle this sort of thing. But nobody can handle that other trip—the possibility that any freak with $1.98 can walk into Circus-Circus and suddenly appear in the sky over downtown Las Vegas twelve times the size of God, howling anything that comes into his head. No, this is not a good town for psychedelic drugs. Reality itself is too twisted.

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  Plucino said on Feb 28, 2012 about the Paperback edition | Add your feedback

• 

  Good read

  Very good read.

  Probably one of the only books I've read that is near enough spot on to the movie. Only a few elements changed. Very minor changes, such as the songs being played on the radio, and a few conversations.

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  Artyparker said on Sep 8, 2011 about the Paperback edition | Add your feedback

• 

  Definitely better than the adaptatioon for the big screen, as the movie simply seems to be a story about drugs, while the book achieves to criticize society and particularly the Ameerican dream.

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  Elle Driver said on Aug 22, 2010 about the Paperback edition | Add your feedback

• 

  the book of my favourite film! Brilliant and amazing!
  It talks about the seventies. In particular a trip of two drug addicted that try by themselves every kinds of drugs.
  You live with their eyes: stunning!

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  paolorinaldo said on Jul 17, 2010 about the Paperback edition | Add your feedback

• 

  "There are only two adjectives writers care about... Brilliant and Outrageous. Hunter Thompson has a freehold on both of them."
  Tom Wolfe

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  Mpux said on Dec 25, 2009 about the Paperback edition | Add your feedback

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Book Details

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• English Books
• Mass Market Paperback 204 Pages
• ISBN-10: 0007743947
• ISBN-13: 9780007743940
• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Also available as: Paperback, Hardcover, Audio Cassette and Others
• In other languages: other languages Livres Français, Deutsche Bücher, Libros en Español, Livros em Português, Libri Italiani, Svenska böcker

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