Word: books
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...surprisingly, the two manage to survive their adventure with only a sustained high. This episode, typical of the acknowledged "Prince of Gonzo," can be found in the title piece of his first book in six years, The Great Shark Hunt...
Even in the handful of months since its conception, Hackett's book has become laughably dated. The military details of tank strengths and armor-piercing capabilities Hackett keeps under rigid command and control, but the basic premises that lead him to conclude a European land war is conceivable fall out of his influence even as he tries to marshal them...
Nitpicking aside, flaws like these cast doubt on the most basic premise of his book. The Third World War is a call to rearmament, a shrill blast of the trumpet for Western governments to boost their military expenditures now, before it's too late and the crawling armies of Bolshevism engulf what Hackett calls "the free nations of the Western world." He believes the advent of "flexible response" military policies in the sixties--abandoning automatic massive nuclear retaliation in favor of both conventional and nuclear forces--makes land war in Europe a distinct possibility over the next decade...
...consciousness writing style consider his stuff to be no more than "pseudo-literary exhibitionism," the product of a burned-out mind and of little significance to anyone but academics doing studies on the evil effects of narcotics. William F. Buckley Jr., writing in this week's New York Times Book Review, predictably attributes Thompson's work to "a very nearly unrelieved distemper," and comments that he "elicits the same kind of admiration one would feel for a streaker at Queen Victoria's funeral...
THOMPSON'S NEWEST BOOK, over 600 pages, includes 49 articles that span his career from a relatively straight South American reporter for the National Observer in the early 60's through the protogonzoid transition stage of the late 60's to Rolling Stone national affairs correspondent in the disgustingly un-freaked-out 70's, where Thompson's semi-paranoid, disoriented, "vulgar," terminal brilliance reminds the stultified that there is an unpleasant side of life, whether they like...