Quotes
“Hunter Thompson is the most creatively crazy and vulnerable of the New Journalists. His ideas are brilliant and honorable and valuable…the literary equivalent of cubism: all rules are broken.”
Kurt Vonnegut
“There are only two adjectives writers care about anymore…brilliant and outrageous…and Hunter Thompson has a freehold on both of them.”
Tom Wolfe
“His hallucinated vision strikes one as having been, after all, the sanest.”
Nelson Algren, National Book Award–winning author
He amuses; he frightens; he flirts with doom. His achievement is substantial.”
Garry Wills, Pulitzer Prize–winning author
“A vital, deliriously erratic force in journalism…Reading Hunter Thompson is like using gasoline for aftershave—bracing…These untidy letters are welcome, showing us as they do a great American original in his lair.”
New York Times Book Review
“Thompson was after what F. Scott Fitzgerald called ‘the high white note,’ and this collection is a symphony of such celestial peaks of excitement, humor, and wisdom.”
Entertainment Weekly
“Thompson should be recognized for contributing some of the clearest, most bracing, and fearless analysis of the possibilities and failures of American democracy in the past century. Reading through this latest collection of letters, one cannot but agree with him as he proclaims, ‘I am one of the best writers currently using the English language as both musical instrument and political weapon.’”
Chicago Tribune
“What we have here is vintage Hunter S. Thompson, a literary orgy of wicked irreverence.”
Boston Globe
“The collection…stands as an extremely valuable historical document and a testament to Thompson’s lasting importance as both journalist and stylist.”
Village Voice
“Thompson altered permanently the nature of political journalism by
injecting into his reportage the personal and the pathological, and this
second volume of letters reads like rehearsals for his more public
utterances, almost every page ringing with the sound of gunfire, revving
motorcycle engines and partying that began at a level where most
partying ends. What may surprise readers is the sweetness of much of the
writing. While Thompson's correspondents include a virtual who's who of
the era, from Tom Wolfe and Kurt Vonnegut to Jimmy Carter and George
McGovern, he wrote to his fans like a kind if slightly deranged uncle,
trying to convince one not to join the Hell's Angels, offering a second
help with her term paper. Despite the occasional lollipop, however,
Thompson's strong suit is still invective, of which he remains the
unsurpassed master.”
Publishers Weekly (starred review)