Hunter S. Thompson was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky. His books include HELL'S ANGELS, FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS, FEAR AND LOATHING ON THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL, THE CURSE OF LONO, SONGS OF THE DOOMED, BETTER THAN SEX and THE PROUD HIGHWAY. He now lives in a fortified compound near Aspen, Colorado.
When the celebrated iconoclast was a feisty kid working for an English-language newspaper in San Juan 40 years ago, he wrote, and then put aside, a novel, which is here resurrected. It is very much a young man's book, clearly based on Thompson's own situation and some of the peopleÄmostly drunks and layaboutsÄwho gravitated to a loosely supervised journalistic stint in the tropics. An introduction sets the scene, and the novel that follows is almost equally documentary in tone: young Kemp comes aboard at the News, gets to know its perpetually embattled proprietor and some of his feckless staff. He observes the island, as the invasion of American tourists and values is just beginning to change its lazy, sun-struck character. He gets involved in a drunken fight with the police, is thrown in jail, bailed out and goes in for a little shame-faced PR writing. He comes between a wild colleague and the equally unbuttoned young Connecticut girl he has brought out to visit him, and the end is a youth's easy-won nostalgia for a silly, drunken time. As he always has done, Thompson lays on the drinking and general hell-raising very thick (the amount of rum consumed would dry up a distillery) and indulges flashes of bad temper toward commercialism while always showing a willingness to do whatever it takes to make a buck. His style is less hallucinatory and exclamatory than it later became, but the groundwork is there. The best parts of the book are its occasional, almost grudging, acknowledgments of natural beauty; the people in it are no more than props. Author tour. (Nov.)
Thompson has long been known as the father of gonzo journalism. His essays‘part fact, part fiction‘on politics, media, and the culture of his America can be as beautiful as a poem or as brutal as today's news. The Rum Diary, begun in 1959, is his first novel. It is also an autobiography, for he is evident in the character of Paul Kemp, a young writer new to Puerto Rico: "a seeker, a mover, a malcontent." Kemp has accepted a job on the Daily News, the English-language paper in San Juan. He soon meets the paper's photographer, Sala, and another young reporter, Yeaman. Together, they embark on a strange odyssey‘a drunken, carousing journey through the Caribbean of the 1950s. Amazingly beautiful passages, well read by Campbell Scott, run dead end into dark ugly reminders of the violence, fear, and loathing that populate Thompson's later work (e.g., Songs of the Doomed, Audio Reviews, LJ 6/15/91) . Recommended for all libraries with an interest in politics, journalism, and American literature.‘Theresa Connors, Arkansas Tech Univ., Russellville
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