Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century » (Reprint)

To summarize Hunter S. Thompson s career is nearly impossible. His writing covered sports, politics, personal letters, social commentary, and Gonzo Journalism -- his own brand of hyper-subjective observation of nearly everything that crosses his path. A welcomed troublemaker, the name Hunter S. Thompson conjures the image of a man bearing firearms and whiskey, daring his readers to question their realities.

Brilliant, provocative, outrageous, and brazen, Hunter S. Thompson's infamous rule breaking — in his journalism, in his life, and of the law — changed the shape of American letters and the face of American icons. Kingdom of Fear traces the course of Thompson's life as a rebel — from a smart-mouthed Kentucky kid flouting all authority to a convention-defying journalist who came to personify a wild fusion of fact, fiction, and mind-altering substances.

Call it the evolution of an outlaw. Here are the formative experiences that comprise Thompson's legendary trajectory alongside the weird and the ugly. Whether detailing his exploits as a foreign correspondent in Rio, his job as night manager of the notorious O'Farrell Theatre in San Francisco, his epic run for sheriff of Aspen on the Freak Power ticket, or the sensational legal maneuvering that led to his full acquittal in the famous 99 Days trial, Thompson is at the peak of his narrative powers in Kingdom of Fear. And this boisterous, blistering ride illuminates as never before the professional and ideological risk taking of a literary genius and transgressive icon.

The Los Angeles Times

The great satirist Terry Southern once stated that the writer's duty is to astonish the reader. Hunter S. Thompson reliably fulfills this mandate with audacious and finely crafted storytelling, and one simply marvels in astonishment. Inhabiting a one-man's-land that blurs journalism and fiction and precludes nothing, Thompson creates no finer collections of written word. Such is his latest random memoir, Kingdom of Fear. — Michael Simmons