Bite-sized book reviews
Bite-sized book reviews
If you can push past the overt misogyny, racism, homophobia, and a few jokes about animal cruelty… well then you’re left with a drug addled trip of “gonzo journalism” that at time makes you feel like you’re the one that just inhaled ether while coming down from mescaline and a hit of heroin. It’s a lot. I did laugh out loud several times at the “drug logic” of the narrator, Duke, as he makes his way around Vegas so out of his mind that he can’t see that he is his own worst enemy, while trying to accomplish his job of reporting on a motorcycle convention and an anti-drug police convention. His attorney comes along for most of the trip and deals out very sound advice through the whole book, and by sound advice I mean encourages Duke to injest more intoxicating substances than I was aware the human body could handle. It’s entertaining, confusing, and also considered in the running for the best books. I thought this description by Crawford Woods summed in nicely “this book is such a mind storm that we may need a little time to know that it is also literature… it unfolds a parable of the nineteen-sixties to those of us who lived in them in a mood—perhaps more melodramatic than astute—of social strife, surreal politics and the chemical feast.”