Monday, February 21, 2005

Hunter S Thompson

So the great man finally shot himself. What I liked the best in the books of Dr. Thompson was the insight. When I read "fear and loathing on the campaign trail", he did have many interesting things to say about American politics in the early 70s. After a while he seemed to get a bad reputation, so he wasn't allowed to get close to people in power. The book "better than sex" was much less effective, because he stayed in his ranch, and just spent his time sending faxes to CNN. (Many of the reviewers on Amazon seem to like this book for some reason). He meets Bill Clinton, just once, and then all he talks about is the French fries that the big man stuffed his face with. I liked the stories about the guns and drugs as well of course, but that was only part of what Dr. Thompson was about. Many of the commentators seemed to be only interested in his excesses. When he was on a TV documentary, they put subtitles on, because they must have felt that he was difficult to understand. Here is story in the independent newspaper