Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream

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Description

This cult classic of gonzo journalism is the most productive chronicle of drug-soaked, addle-brained, rollicking good times ever committed to the printed page. It is usually the tale of a long weekend road go back and forth that has gone down in the annals of American pop culture as some of the strangest journeys ever undertaken.
Heralded as the “best book on the dope decade” by the New York Times Book Review, Hunter S. Thompson’s documented drug orgy through Las Vegas would no doubt leave Nancy Reagan blushing and D.A.R.E. founders rethinking their motto. Under the pseudonym of Raoul Duke, Thompson travels with his Samoan attorney, Dr. Gonzo, in a souped-up convertible dubbed the “Great Red Shark.” In its trunk, they stow “two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half-full of cocaine and a complete galaxy of multicolored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers…. A quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls,” which they have the ability to consume all over their short tour.

On assignment from a sports magazine to cover “the fabulous Mint 400”–a free-for-all biker’s race in the heart of the Nevada desert–the drug-a-delic duo stumbles through Vegas in hallucinatory hopes of finding the American dream (two truck-stop waitresses tell them it’s nearby, but can’t take into account that if it’s on the right or the left). They of course never get the story, but they do commit the only sins in Vegas: “burning the locals, abusing the tourists, terrifying the help.” For Thompson to take into account that and pen his experiences with such clarity and wit is little short of a miracle; an impressive feat no matter how one feels about the subject material. A first-rate sensibility twinger, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a pop-culture classic, an icon of an era past, and a nugget of pure comedic genius. –Rebekah Warren

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