"No other reporter reveals how much we have to fear and loathe, yet does it so hilariously."
-- Chicago Tribune
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You need look no further for this writer's best: this collection of pieces, first published in 1979, spans all of Thompson's primo era, including short pieces and selections from longer works. The Great Shark Hunt sports a few articles filed by a pre-Gonzo Hunter S. Thompson, which show flickers of passion but no real fire; the first experiments with the author's drug-fueled brand of journalism at the Kentucky Derby; and finally the gigs that made him an American institution, in Las Vegas and on the 1972 campaign trail.
Thompson's style is so unique that a reader is tempted to think that he leapt, fully formed, into Gonzohood. However, along with the crazy, careening prose itself, one of the auxiliary pleasures of The Great Shark Hunt is the map that it gives of Thompson's ascent (or descent, if you prefer) from the workaday hyperbole of sports writing to the hell-blast vigor of his later work. The drugs are, by and large, a distraction--lifestyle points that get in the way of the genuinely perceptive journalism that Thompson created. (But they are there, always, and in quantity.) If you're looking for insight into the underbelly of America, Hunter S. Thompson is your best and only guide, and The Great Shark Hunt is an excellent place to begin the grim safari. --Michael Gerber
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Nowhere else is the richness of Thompson's talent so fully illustrated than in _Shark Hunt_. Here, in "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved," a chronicle of the yearly madness in Thompson's hometown of Louisville, the reader experiences the earliest rumblings of what would later become a totally unique journalistic style that he further developed in "Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl," also found here.
We are also treated to assorted dispatches from Thompson's travels throughout North and South America, written when he was a roaming correspondent for Dow Jones' _National Observer._ Here the true skill and power of Thompson's writing becomes apparent -- an observation both powerful and poignant when these writings are compared to his later works, making it clear that the drugs have indeed taken their toll on his remarkable mind.
For the new Gonzoist, excerpts are included from _Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas_ as well as _Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72._ Through not very useful if you own these books already, they still make for fun bathroom reading.
Also included are most, if not all, of Thompson's articles for "Rolling Stone" about the Watergate scandal and Nixon's resignation -- truly rollicking political tales full of savage grace and fiendish wit. Sadly lacking are Ralph Steadman's original drawings which accompanied the stories in RS.
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