Product Description

Stylish reissue of a classic first published in the 1970s: Hunter S Thompson's ether-fuelled, savage journey to the heart of the American Dream. 'We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold! And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas!' As knights of old buckled on armour of supernatural power, so Hunter S. Thompson enters Las Vegas armed with a veritable arsenal of 'heinous chemicals'. His perilous, drug-enhanced confrontations with casino operators, bartenders, police officers and assorted representatives of the Silent Majority have a hallucinatory humour and nightmare terror never before seen on the printed page.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1412 in Books
• Published on: 2005-04-04
• Format: Illustrated
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Review
'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a scorching epochal sensation. There are only two adjectives writers care about any more! "brilliant" and "outrageous"! and Hunter Thompson has a freehold on both of them.' Tom Wolfe 'What goes on in these pages makes Lenny Bruce seem angelic! the whole book boils down to a mad, corrosive prose poetry that picks up where Norman Mailer's An American Dream left off and explores what Tom Wolfe left out.' New York Times

About the Author
Hunter S. Thompson is incomparably the most celebrated exponent of the New Journalism. His books include Hell's Angels, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 and Generation of Swine. Ralph Steadman is one of Britain's best-known cartoonists and illustrators. His books include I, Leonardo and the bestselling illustrated Animal Farm.

Customer Reviews

No more of the speed that fuelled the sixties
There is far more to "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" than most people think. It is not "about" drugs. It is not about road trips or any of that rubbish...

It is in fact a modern Gatsby. "The Great Gatsby" is one of the greatest novels of the century, and Thompson was well aware of Fitzgerald's masterpiece. Both novels deal with that particular characteristic of the American mindset summed up in the phrase "the American Dream"... this is characterised by two things: (1) a belief in agency, or the power of the individual to shape his or her own life and (2) a disregard for the past in preference of the future. Jay Gatsby embodied agency in the sense that he invented himself, and he showed his disregard for the past because he spent all his time trying to get Daisy to return to a time before she met Tom. "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" is just as complex as Gatsby though there isn't space to properly go into it here... But, for starters:

Has anyone else noticed that the first half of the novel is almost exactly the same as the second half? they are structurally identical. the hitch-hiker is replaced by Lucy, one hotel is replaced by another, one car by another, etc. This is not necessarily Thompson's laziness... the past repeating itself is a recurrent theme (is Bush the Nixon of our generation? different?). Thompson is smarter than most people give him credit for and if you want to get anything "solid" from this book then you should try to engage with it on an intelligent level... Thompson's/Duke's actions represent the amazing possibilities which lie at the heart of the American Dream... "but only for those with true grit" ... Thompson makes the seventies a failure of the sixties...

Additional: his recent work may be sub-par (or comparatively so) but buy his volumes of collected letters; they show a man who gets enormous joy from real writing (spending a lot of time getting the words "just so" - this is the mark of a real writer...).

A savage indictment of america - and the funniest book ever
By far the most intelligent and funny book I've ever read. But it's so much more than that, it captures the polarization of cultures in america at the end of the sixties and many of the observations still ring true today. A brilliant satire, the drawings by Ralph Steadman complement the text wonderfully well.

My favourite quote: 'at one point I tried to drive the Great Red Shark into the laundry room of the Landmark Hotel - but the door was too narrow, and the people inside seemed dangerously excited'.

Genius.

RIP Hunter.

Don't be put off
This book shouldn't be dismissed as a drug culture fable, as some who are new to Hunter S. Thompson may be inclined to. Those who have seen the recent film directed by Terry Gilliam in particular should be wary of being put off by the overt grossness which, while certainly present in the book, is more distastefully portrayed in the film. Where the film sometimes repels you with the apparently uncomprehendable and ugly actions of the characters, the book draws you into the peculiar and ultimately reasonable worldview of Thompson, where the same actions make more sense. On a more banal level the dialogue, both internal and external, which is a crucial feature of the story, is more complete and easier to follow in the book.

On one level the book is indeed a drug fable, a gung-ho yarn of conspicuous excess and consumption. But over and above this the book has much to say about 'conventional' culture, by way of its demented drug-fueled counterpoint. The Fear and Loathing of the title refers to the author's own feelings of disappointment and disillusionment with the society around him, which are the book's real theme.

Along the way the actual text is hilarious, with Thompson's trademark dry cutting irony and understated exaggeration turned on full-force. A modern classic.