Any review of Thompson’s work is morally obliged to linger over the phrase “gonzo journalism,” but this book is so much more than that. Underneath the coke and blotter acid, away from the mad dash around the desert, is a mini-treatise on the “brutish reality of this foul Year of Our Lord, 1971.” Thompson’s thoughts on the waning of the sixties’ counterculture and the Vietnam war are sage and poetic social commentary, but chances are you’ll be too absorbed by all the weirdness to care. This is, by any objective measure, one of the most killer books in the history of mescaline. Big ups to the eternally off-center dude who had his ashes shot out of a cannon after he croaked. Reviewed on Jan. 7, 2021