|
Loading... Fear and Loathing in Las Vegasby Hunter S. Thompson
LibraryThing recommendationsMember recommendations
Loading...
won't like
will probably not like
will probably like
will like
will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. Reading this is like a nightmare that reminds you of everything that went sour from the 60's. The most indulgent piece of tripe I've ever read. ( )For all his personal flaws and excesses, Hunter can be a truly incisive and witty writer. Another "new journalism" style book, The movie follows the book almost word-for-word. Thompson definitely has a different style of writing/journalism. Very interesting, though. Even though what the protagonist is going through, is still somehow coherent enough to make some sort of sense. Watched the movie first, read the book second...even though I love the book, I like the movie better (Johnny Depp is easy to look at). Meh. Maybe I'm too old for this book or I should have read it when I was more adventurous. Couldn't get into screaming, drug induced road trip. I prefer a plot or message. Where to begin? I just finished this wild ride and I'm a bit disoriented. To be perfectly honest (and I think that my rating sums it up) I did not particularly enjoy this novel. Maybe I'm not open enough to the types of things that the protagonists get into, or maybe I'm a bit too young to get the whole gist of the early 70's drug culture, but I was mostly just lost. The storyline revolves around a journalist and his attorney and their experiences in Las Vegas covering first a road rally race, then a district attorney's conference all the while hopped up on every kind of drug imaginable. The first half of the book, they are so stoned out of their minds that most of what they see, hear and experience are just paranoid delusions that they take for reality. I found a lot of it really hard to follow and basically didn't really catch my interest. Once Part II got into swing, they've run low on some of the more potent drugs and things begin to make a little more sense, or at least are so much less confusing that I could follow what was going on. Thompson's prose are fine. I do not question his writing ability, I guess I am just not in tune with his style or at least not in this book. 0.167 seconds to build listing no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com Amazon.com Reviews (ISBN 0679785892, Paperback)Heralded as the "best book on the dope decade" by the New York Times Book Review, Hunter S. Thompson's documented drug orgy through Las Vegas would no doubt leave Nancy Reagan blushing and D.A.R.E. founders rethinking their motto. Under the pseudonym of Raoul Duke, Thompson travels with his Samoan attorney, Dr. Gonzo, in a souped-up convertible dubbed the "Great Red Shark." In its trunk, they stow "two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half-full of cocaine and a whole galaxy of multicolored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers.... A quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls," which they manage to consume during their short tour.On assignment from a sports magazine to cover "the fabulous Mint 400"--a free-for-all biker's race in the heart of the Nevada desert--the drug-a-delic duo stumbles through Vegas in hallucinatory hopes of finding the American dream (two truck-stop waitresses tell them it's nearby, but can't remember if it's on the right or the left). They of course never get the story, but they do commit the only sins in Vegas: "burning the locals, abusing the tourists, terrifying the help." For Thompson to remember and pen his experiences with such clarity and wit is nothing short of a miracle; an impressive feat no matter how one feels about the subject matter. A first-rate sensibility twinger, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a pop-culture classic, an icon of an era past, and a nugget of pure comedic genius. --Rebekah Warren (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:24 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
Abebooks |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||