Freak Kingdom
Hunter S. Thompson's Manic Ten-Year Crusade Against American Fascism
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4.4 • 5 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
The story of Hunter S. Thompson's crusade against Richard Nixon and the threat of fascism in America--and the devastating price he paid for it
Hunter S. Thompson is often misremembered as a wise-cracking, drug-addled cartoon character. This book reclaims him for what he truly was: a fearless opponent of corruption and fascism, one who sacrificed his future well-being to fight against it, rewriting the rules of journalism and political satire in the process. This skillfully told and dramatic story shows how Thompson saw through Richard Nixon's treacherous populism and embarked on a life-defining campaign to stop it. In his fevered effort to expose institutional injustice, Thompson pushed himself far beyond his natural limits, sustained by drugs, mania, and little else. For ten years, he cast aside his old ambitions, troubled his family, and likely hastened his own decline, along the way producing some of the best political writing in our history.
This timely biography recalls a period of anger and derangement in American politics, and one writer with the guts to tell the truth.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Denevi (Hyper: A Personal History of ADHD), a professor of fine arts at George Mason University, serves up a sympathetic biography of Hunter S. Thompson, focusing on the journalist and countercultural figure's life from 1963 to 1974. Denevi's premise, which is only spottily supported, is that Thompson sacrificed himself, descending into drug addiction and a chaotic lifestyle, in order to battle fascism as personified by Richard Nixon and other Vietnam-era politicians. Thompson is, for Denevi, a principled truth teller who understood the dangers to America posed by the Vietnam War and Nixon's cynical dishonesty. But the text is mainly a straightforward biography. As Denevi recounts, in the course of those years Thompson immersed himself in the motorcycle gang Hell's Angels and wrote his genre-breaking book about them; reported on the riots at the 1968 Democratic Convention; engaged in participatory democracy by running for sheriff of Aspen, Co.; wrote Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas; for Rolling Stone magazine; covered the 1972 presidential campaign and Richard Nixon; and developed "gonzo journalism," the highly personal, free-flowing style with no boundaries between writer and subject and no pretense of objectivity. This account will deepen readers' understanding of the personal events and experiences that surrounded and informed Thompson's best-known works, and as such is best suited to those already familiar with them.
