kristin's Full Review: Hunter S. Thompson - The Rum Diary: The Long Lost ...
Hunter S. Thompson has garnered a reputation for living on the edge -- tripping (literally) through life and careening towards certain death, only to veer off just in time, collect consciousness, and write about what he saw. His most famous work, "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" has become cult classic and was recently turned into a film directed by Terry Gilliam (of "Brazil") fame.
But you'd be missing out on a whole other side of Thompson's personality if you didn't pick up his most recent work, "The Rum Diary." This book has all the intensity of Thompson's "Fear and Loathing" -- it just takes place in a different era. Thompson takes us back to a time before the heady days of his speed trips, back to the old San Juan, Puerto Rico of the late 50s, when the author was a journalist working for the Daily News. As he puts it "Puerto Rico was a backwater and the News was staffed mainly by ill-tempered wandering rabble." His crowd is made up of the old-time journalists that we've all heard about: those who live on the fringes of society and are barely above the criminals about whom they write -- distained by cops, politicians, and locals alike. These guys drink hard, party harder, and flirt with disaster at every turn -- often fleeing a country after a particularly bad bout of drunkenness and violence.
Thompson is on a soul-search of sorts. The friends he's made in Puerto Rico still have that wild abandon of youth - something that he fears he has lost forever. He writes " Yeamon…was probably twenty-four or -five and he reminded me vaguely of myself at that age…Listening to him, I realized how long it had been since I'd felt like I had the world by the balls, how many quick birthdays had gone by since that first year in Europe when I was so ignorant and so confident that every splinter of luck made me feel like a roaring champion."
Not only did I enjoy getting a glimpse of old San Juan, I was stunned by Thompson's depth and sensitivity. This man is a master of words and this is one of his finest works.
Begun in 1959 by a then-twenty-two-year-old Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary is a brilliantly tangled love story of jealousy, treachery and violent a...More at HotBookSale
Based on Thompson s own experiences as a reporter in Puerto Rico in the late 50s and early 60s, this long-lost coming-of-age novel ( San Francisco Chr...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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