Jacket Copy: http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/252-jacket-copy-for-fear-and-loathing-in-las-vegas-a-savage-journey-to-the-heart-of-the-american-dream
Similar to: Tom Wolfe, Bret Easton Ellis, Jack Kerouac
My Take: This book seems to be over-rated. The feeling I came away from it with was that I wanted the author to tell me more. There just wasn't enough meat to this book. The writing style is also not particularly remarkable or innovative. It's not pretty or interesting prose to read; it's just plain prose. (Disclaimer: Pretty-to-read prose is just one of my personal preferences in literature, so obviously this is not a universal criticism, just my personal reason for disliking the book).
The author also tends to assume that if you're reading this book, you share his political views (i.e. Nixon and business interests are the devil). To that end, he doesn't give us any reasoned arguments for why he feels this way, he just assumes that we know why. I would have liked to see him expound more upon the themes of what exactly has gone wrong with our country in the 70s, rather than just repeating "drugs, violence. drugs, violence" over and over again but not even delving into how exactly they've been the downfall of the American Dream.
The fake journalism part of it just gets on my nerves; i don't feel that this narrative technique really adds much at all to the story--it may even take away from the books' main messages by distracting us with unnecessary details.
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