Hey Rube: Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine ...Thompson's last book ....

[NVMojo]

Hey Rube: Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine, and the Downward Spiral of Dumbness by Hunter S. Thompson



January 2005 - Bookslut Review:

Gonzo journalism always seemed most suited to two things: politics and sports. Few other fields are filled with the deep levels of corruption, insanely overpaid egoists, and sheer obliviousness as these two, and asking Hunter S. Thompson, the originator of the style, to write a weekly column for their website was a stroke of genius on ESPN's part. In 2000, ESPN decided to make their site more "entertaining," but when your most engaging writing is Peter Gammons, you're not going to get a lot of (intentional) laughs without going outside the traditional sportswriting field. Thompson's columns added a sense of legitimacy to ESPN's site, as well as a sense of the absurd that I suspect took some execs by surprise. The first few years of resulting columns have now been collected in Hey Rube: Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine, and the Downward Spiral of Dumbness: Modern History from the Sports Desk, a book that highlights the best and worst of Gonzo journalism.
If you're not already familiar with Thompson's style, it's a mix of run-on sentences, Random Capitalizations, and stream-of-consciousness that defies almost every traditional journalistic convention, up and including the one about not blending fact and fiction. In Rube, this means we not only get rants about every Nascar and Major League Baseball, we also get rants about George Bush's lack of ethics and intelligence -- Thompson calls him the "embattled child-president" -- and multi-column digressions about a Prince Omar who comes over to Thompson's house to gamble away his own sister. Sports fan or not, you'll need a good sense of the absurd before you even start reading a book by Thompson.

Once you get past the surrealism, Rube is one of the angriest books I've read in years. Starting from a general tone of outrage over the state of sports (something that's well-earned), with ire aimed at everything from the mess of the current NBA mediocrity to the gambling pitfalls involved in the NCAA Final Four, his outrage grows as the columns span the controversial 2000 national elections, and then continues to expand after September 11, 2001. His September 12 column, in which he states, "this is going to be a very expensive war, and Victory is not guaranteed -- for anyone, and certainly not for a baffled little creep like George W. Bush," is strikingly prescient three years later.

more...

http://www.bookslut.com/nonfiction/2005_01_003996.php

[NVMojo]

1. someone's going to make big bucks off "The Rum Diary" movie

when it is completed ...Johnny Depp to star ...book by HST

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0376136/