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A review by kahn_johnson
Hell's Angels by Hunter S. Thompson
3.0
Hunter is one of those guys who, quite deliberately, divides opinion.
He created his own genre of journalism - but he was also a gun-toting, pill-popping loon. He also had some bad points...
But the key thing about Hunter's writing - think Fear and Loathing, Campaign Trail, hell even Rum Diary - is that it's essentially about him.
It's always about him. What he feels, what he experiences, what he does.
Now obviously Hunter didn't become the car-crash author of legend overnight. He had to start somewhere.
And here is where it all began, with Hunter taking a look at the social scourge of the day, the Hells Angels.
And here is where the problems begin.
For a start, Hunter isn't as good a writer when he's just observing. Sure we get flickers of the colourful prose we'll come to love, but he's too busy paying attention to what's going on to actually splurge it on the page.
If you don't know what's to come with his work, you almost certainly don't notice this. But if you started with his later volumes and are now going back to the start, then you can see what's missing.
But the bigger problem is one of time.
You see, back in the late 60s the Hells Angels were the Big Bad of the American media and politicians. No one had seen the like before, and it sold papers so the events happily got hyped. I suspect the fact the Angels were never going to sue helped matters.
But now, in 2017, we have much bigger social injustices occurring - we have actual minorities being targeted and marginalised, attacked and victimised.
It's kind of hard to feel bad for a bunch of people who were vilified for their way of life when they had actually chosen to be those people.
Times have changed, and in doing so has perhaps not been kind to Hunter's debut, but it's nice to see where it all began.
He created his own genre of journalism - but he was also a gun-toting, pill-popping loon. He also had some bad points...
But the key thing about Hunter's writing - think Fear and Loathing, Campaign Trail, hell even Rum Diary - is that it's essentially about him.
It's always about him. What he feels, what he experiences, what he does.
Now obviously Hunter didn't become the car-crash author of legend overnight. He had to start somewhere.
And here is where it all began, with Hunter taking a look at the social scourge of the day, the Hells Angels.
And here is where the problems begin.
For a start, Hunter isn't as good a writer when he's just observing. Sure we get flickers of the colourful prose we'll come to love, but he's too busy paying attention to what's going on to actually splurge it on the page.
If you don't know what's to come with his work, you almost certainly don't notice this. But if you started with his later volumes and are now going back to the start, then you can see what's missing.
But the bigger problem is one of time.
You see, back in the late 60s the Hells Angels were the Big Bad of the American media and politicians. No one had seen the like before, and it sold papers so the events happily got hyped. I suspect the fact the Angels were never going to sue helped matters.
But now, in 2017, we have much bigger social injustices occurring - we have actual minorities being targeted and marginalised, attacked and victimised.
It's kind of hard to feel bad for a bunch of people who were vilified for their way of life when they had actually chosen to be those people.
Times have changed, and in doing so has perhaps not been kind to Hunter's debut, but it's nice to see where it all began.