Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72

Hunter S. Thompson

Gonzo Journalism With a Political Twist

I like Thompson’s work. He’s insightful, intelligent, and overall just a really entertaining guy to read. Fear and Loathing is really no different in that respect. He follows George McGovern throughout the presidential campaign in 1972, and is writing a series for, who else, Rolling Stone. Starting in the primaries, he traces the campaign through interviews and friendships with those who are involved in it. Thompson makes no bones about his support for McGovern and his intense dislike of Nixon: neutral observer he isn’t, to the surprise of absolutely nobody. It reveals the campaign trail at its most raw, and all the emotions, work, and dedication that goes into a presidential campaign.

Specific Appeal

As much as I liked this book, it only appeals to a certain audience: the historically minded folks among us who also appreciate good political journalism.

Grain of Salt

Sometimes he likes to accuse various candidates of taking various forms of speed, which is a very subtle joke. It’s easy to miss this and others he places in the text, so I wouldn’t call this a book of record for the election.

Passage of the Day

I just really liked this specific passage in the book, and I’d like to share it with you all. While covering the Republican convention and protests surrounding it, he observes a group of Vietnam vets against war silently marching towards the convention hall:

But as I drove toward Key Biscayne with the top down, squinting into the sun, I saw the Vets… They were moving up Collins Avenue in dead silence; twelve hundred of them dressed in battle fatigues, helmets, combat boots… a few carried full-sizes plastic M-16s, many peace symbols, girlfriends walking beside vets being pushed along the street in slow-moving wheelchairs, others walking jerkily on crutches… But nobody spoke: all the “stop, start,” “fast, slow,” “left, right” commands came from the “platoon leaders” walking slightly off to the side of the main column and using hand signals.

One look at that eerie procession killed my plan to go swimming that afternoon. I left my car at a parking meter in front of the Cadillac Hotel and joined the march… No, “joined” is the wrong word; that was not the kind of procession you just walked up and “joined.” Not without paying some very heavy dues; an arm gone here, a leg there, paralysis, a face full of lumpy scar tissue… all staring straight ahead as the long silent column moved between rows of hotel porches full of tight-lipped Senior Citizens through the heart of Miami Beach.

The silence of the march was contagious, almost threatening. There were hundreds of spectators, but nobody said a word. I walked beside the column for ten blocks, and the only sounds I remember hearing were the soft thump of boot leather on hot asphalt and the occasional rattling of an open canteen top.

 

Naked Lunch

William S. Burroughs

My uncle always has found really interesting books for me to read. No genre could be excluded from the books he lends me: obscure sci-fi, dense fiction, or subversive texts are all expected and subsequently consumed by my “innocent” mind. I had received ”Naked Lunch” for my birthday last year, but finally came to it in my reading queue. It’s something that’s hard to describe, so I won’t spend too much time talking about it, because I simply can’t put it into words that would do it justice.

This Book is Insane

Essentially, the plot is “a dude in the 60s takes far too much heroin and has all sorts of wacky and oftentimes disturbing stories to share.” But I’m not even sure of that. Some of it focuses on the depravity and desperation that “junk” addicts experience in their quest for more drugs, but “Naked Lunch” also takes frequent sidetrips into “the interzone,” which is where odd and thoroughly demonic creatures exist.

This Book is Disturbing

I don’t mean disturbing as in “OMG WE NEED TO CALL CONGRESS,” but in a “I’ve never been exposed to this kind of content” before kind of way.

Plot? What Plot.

There’s some semblance of a plot, but not really. Don’t focus too much on the overarching plot and instead narrow down to each individual story contained within. Otherwise your brain will explode.

This Book is Great

Burroughs created a masterpiece. Read it. Learn from it. Enjoy this oddly amusing and dark set of half-truths and prose known as “Naked Lunch.” You won’t regret it. Or maybe you will. But really, it’s only 200 pages. And if you hate it, you can just write a book like this and make me an evil character in it.

The Shadow of the Wind

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

A friend and I regularly swap books with each other. Although sometimes aiming to give them a book they’ll really enjoy, often we decide to share something that may be a little out of the normal topic or genre that they’re used to reading. It’s a great way to break out of our literary molds and be forced to read something that we may otherwise pass by in favor of something else. “In The Shadow of the Wind” is one of those books. Set in a slowly decaying Barcelona that has been overcome by fascism and an uncertain political climate, this book dips heavily into Gothic imagery and relies on a complex storyline to wave a complicated story about a teenage boy who finds a mysterious book from a secret book repository which his father introduced him to. Discovering this book is not what it seems, and quickly the protagonist is thrown into a quest to discover what really happened to the author of the book he found, and to discover why all copies of this text are being destroyed.

BUT OKAY LET’S NOT MAKE THIS A BORING REVIEW NOBODY READS. Here’s all you need to know about “In the Shadow of the Wind:”

It’s Gritty, and that’s a good thing.

This is a dark book. Characters are beat up. They die in terrible ways. After exploring abandoned mansions, they end up in even creepier environments. You can’t help but fall into this world Zafon creates.

The Main Character Is Unbelievable

Even WITH the reader thinking “well, this is a gothic novel, so I’m pretty sure it will be over the top and not altogether believable,” the author still had to assume we’d be paying attention to what the characters do and why they do it. I never really did figure out why he was doing anything, other than “it’s something to do, I suppose.” Even when his life was being threatened over this book, he was like “screw it. I’m going to solve this mystery! For the books!” Or something.

Story Arcs Begin, Stall, and Never Reappear Again

In this style of story, the reader should be looking out for all sorts of story arcs and be trying to figure out how they all fit together. This only happened about 50% of the time in “The Shadow of the Wind.” The first hundred pages or so of the book involve a 10-year-old character going after a much older girl, and is represented in all sorts of pre-teenage sexual angst. Then all of a sudden his heart is broken, he moves on, and we never really hear from her again. What the hell? Other characters just kind of appear, pledge their help, and then leave again. I can’t tell if this is a setup for a followup book, or just a case where the author got bored with these storylines.

Underwhelming Ending

It just kind of ends, but we probably already predicted what will happen with 20% left in the book. The only reason the reader keeps going is in hopes of clearing up why these story arcs are never mentioned again. Spoiler: they aren’t mentioned again. Reader is left unsatisfied and ultimately ends up eating a box of twinkies to fill this hole in their soul.

Read It Anyway

I’m not saying it’s a bad book or anything. When Zafon actually does address a story arc, it’s done in an over-the-top fashion and imagery that we’d come to expect from a post-WWII gothic novel. It’s gritty. It’s fun. Despite the generally angsty main character, the other figures who show up in the book are entertaining and much more fun to read about. If anything, the book is a collection of loosely assembled novellas that happen to make a larger plot. Reading each loosely defined section is great, but just don’t expect literary bliss after the author stitches these all together.