Rating:  - Crazy Energy. Laugh Out Loud Funny
Ordinarily, I wouldn't think letters would be that interesting. But Thomson's style and sense of humor are so outrageous, I find myself laughing out loud every few pages or so.
But it's much more than humor. The letters overlap the period of Martin Luther King's Assassination, Robert F. Kennedy's Assassination, the Democratic National Convention of 1968 (which he attended), etc.
I was struck at how he tried to convince his younger brother to stay in college for at least another semester, because by then, we would probably be out of Vietnam. It was apparent to him at the time that we would leave. And yet...Saigon didn't fall until April 1975.
He also has a particular revulsion for Nixon, who has always been a fascinating figure for me. And of course,there are letters to his fans. He clearly has fear and loathing for some of them. His letters to and about them are hillarious.
A great read.
Rating: - HST was IT
This is the middle, and probably the most interesting of the gozno letter trilogy. It is an absolutely must read for any Thonpson fan, or aspiring writer, for that matter. For the casual reader, if you're going to read one of the three volumes, this is it. Thompson's voice is so gripping, even an expense report can be laugh-out-loud funny. He was truely a literary giant.
Rating: - Genius
As with all of Hunter's books....
It's brilliantly interesting and exciting while
informative and political
Rating: - a vicious, fearsome collection
My wife is a newly published writer, and we have found this collection of letters the only thing to read on the (book tour) road. This man knows how to deal with publishers and the stray iguanas out there, and how to have a lot of fun on the way. May the hereafter be wierd enough for the Doktor.
Rating: - "Riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave...."
Two of my favorite contemporary writers have died unexpectedly in the past few months - the Mississippi writer Larry Brown and, more recently, Hunter S. Thompson, who committed suicide on Feb. 20.
Both were deaths that affected me greatly. Usually when I hear of a notable passing, my reaction is, "Oh, no," but in both of these cases my first thought was to hope that the news wasn't true.
In the days following Thompson's death, I found myself going over some of his work - a documentary on the Criterion "Fear & Loathing" DVD, "The Great Shark Hunt" and "Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas."
But the book that I found myself reading the most, and finding a kind of solace in, is this one: Thompson's collected letters from 1968-76.
I used to work in a bookstore and there was always a question of where "Las Vegas" belonged. It obviously wasn't fiction but it also couldn't be entirely true, and that's part of its genius. But with "The Gonzo Letters, Volume II" there is no doubt that this is the genuine article, this is probably the closest look we'll get at what Thompson was like. The sheer fact that he wrote and saved so many letters in the first place tells you a lot about the man himself.
The correspondence here runs the gamut: letters to Oscar Acosta, Tom Wolfe, Charles Kuralt, William Kennedy, Jann Wenner, his brother, his mother, his broker and anybody he had a beef with. The letters take us through his early ups and downs, his campaign for sheriff of Pitkin County and we not only get to follow him through the success of "Las Vegas," but also part of the process of him refining surrealism and colorful exaggeration into the style he'd use in that book.
And tucked away in the book, on page 181 is a letter that gave me a smile and a shiver of sadness as I read it with the news playing in the background on TV. It's a May 19, 1969 letter to the Disabled American Veterans Association, in response to a solicitation for a donation. Thompson opposed the then-raging war in Vietnam and was flabbergasted that the DAV would support it. His reply is so fierce and funny and sad that it even stung me, a bystander, 35 years later.
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