Review by Beaver (2007-11-10)
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is the telling of Hunter S. Thompson's wild and hysterical drug filled romp in Vegas. It does a great job of depicting the hilarious insanity and paranoia of a drug binge. Vegas is the perfect place for all of these off the wall situations and responses. I read this over a Vegas weekend bachelor party - my trip wasn't quite this crazy. This novel has one of the better opening lines, "We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold." 8/10

Review by StefanY (2007-08-24)
Where to begin? I just finished this wild ride and I'm a bit disoriented. To be perfectly honest (and I think that my rating sums it up) I did not particularly enjoy this novel. Maybe I'm not open enough to the types of things that the protagonists get into, or maybe I'm a bit too young to get the whole gist of the early 70's drug culture, but I was mostly just lost.

The storyline revolves around a journalist and his attorney and their experiences in Las Vegas covering first a road rally race, then a district attorney's conference all the while hopped up on every kind of drug imaginable.

The first half of the book, they are so stoned out of their minds that most of what they see, hear and experience are just paranoid delusions that they take for reality. I found a lot of it really hard to follow and basically didn't really catch my interest.

Once Part II got into swing, they've run low on some of the more potent drugs and things begin to make a little more sense, or at least are so much less confusing that I could follow what was going on.

Thompson's prose are fine. I do not question his writing ability, I guess I am just not in tune with his style or at least not in this book.

Review by drache_gnar (2006-04-28)
Very funny, very orginal, very drug-induced and, surprisingly, very well thought-out.
This novel starts out with a huge punch, but slowly looses some potency near the 2/3s mark, but contains a great ending.
Hunter S. Thompson developped this story by splicing events in his real life with complete fiction, and it worked quite well.

Laugh out loud funny - 8/10

Review by mrdude (2005-09-04)
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson is the crazy tale of Hunter S. Thompson's trip to Vegas to "find the American dream".

This is one of those books that I have been intending to read forever but simply hadn't gotten around to. The story itself is quite insane, and at times I wonder just how much of it is truth and how much is hunter Thompson embellishing. Needless to say if half of it is true then I wonder exactly how he survived his own life.

I think part of my enjoyment of this book is the audacity of their situation. Thompson, traveling with his lawyer, goes to Vegas to cover a motorcycle race in the desert. Yet actual journalism seems to elude Thompson, as he takes enough illegal substances to kill most large animals (including whales, elephants and polar bears). Yet, by the end of the book I felt that he actually had captured a much better story than what he had set out for, and maybe that is the point of his crazed lifestyle.

The book is something I would definitely suggest people read. At points it had me laughing hysterically, something I rarely find in literature. It really set you, the reader, directly in the middle this man's, and the rest of the drug culture's mentality. It is one of the only chances one might find to understand and experience these things, with out having to actually literally go out and do them.

(review also posted at the IBDoF)

Review by nui6882 (2003-07-19)
The story of a man, his lawyer, and a trunk full of drugs, this gonzo tale is a dark, cynical, and somehow fun romp through a Las Vegas police convention. One of the more interesting books of the New Journalism.

Review by flagman (2003-03-08)
Hunter S. Thompson seeks out the American Dream in seedy early '70s Las Vegas, powered by fantastic amounts of illicit drugs and joined by his lunatic attorney. Gonzo literature at its finest.