The Gonzo Way: A Celebration of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson

by Anita Thompson

Overview

In The Gonzo Way, Anita Thompson pays tribute to her late husband as a writer and as a citizen, through her own words and through interviews with those who knew him best, including Tom Wolfe, George McGovern, and Douglas Brinkley.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781555916220
Publisher:	Fulcrum Publishing
Publication date:	07/01/2007
Series:	Speaker's Corner Books
Pages:	112
Sales rank:	1,138,198
Product dimensions:	4.50(w) x 7.50(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Anita Thompson began working as Hunter's assistant in 1999. In 2000, she moved in and three years later they were married. Today, she is the publisher of The Woody Creeker magazine and is helping to edit Hunter's book Polo Is My Life, among other projects.

Table of Contents

Foreword   Douglas Brinkley     7
Preface     13
Learning-That's What It's All About     23
It's Wrong When It Stops Being Fun     37
Politics Is the Art of Controlling Your Environment     53
We Is the Most Important Word in Politics     63
Truth Is Easier     80
Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride     97
Never Apologize, Never Explain     106
Acknowledgments     108
Honor Roll     111

Editorial Reviews

In 1999, gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson's fetching and exuberant 25-year-old editorial/research assistant, Anita Bejmuk, ignited her considerably older employer's imagination, to say nothing of his libido; three years later, they married. This work is written from her perspective and from the perspectives of her late husband's closest heavy-hitter friends, including historian Douglas Brinkley (who writes the foreword) and novelist Tom Wolfe. In her own to-the-point style, Thompson's widow distills into seven lessons her late husband's primer for leading a life worth living (e.g., "never apologize, never explain"). In his flamboyant, drug-enhanced rebelliousness, Thompson was as much a self-aware child of late 20th-century conformist America as Ralph Waldo Emerson was of his own 19th-century materialistic and land-grabbing homeland. What Emerson hoped in his most deeply optimistic, deeply American essays was that his young, still unaffiliated readers would keep their innocence, curiosity, and inner freedom as long as they could. And this, despite a somewhat different social context, is precisely what Thompson taught his readers and finally his wife. Recommended for all open-minded adults. [Look for a comparative review of Jann Wenner and Corey Seymour's Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson(Little, Brown; Oct.) in a forthcoming issue.-Ed.]
—Charles C. Nash

Library Journal