4 stars (When the Going Gets Weird) - Reading "Hey Rube" is a bit of a disorienting experience. Doc narrates his gambling-man take on parts of four different football seasons, and it all starts to run together long before the paperback concludes on page 243. Honestly, by the end, I couldn't keep track of who had won which Super Bowl, and whether or not HST beat the point spread. Are the Raiders still in the league?
Reading a collection of ESPN.com colums covering November 2000 through October 2003 in something far quicker than real time is perhaps not the way Hunter S. Thompson is meant to be read. The columns that stuck in my memory, oddly enough, were not the Gonzo columns (except for the stories about Prince "Omar" running through the 2001 World Series). The single column take on Dale Earnhardt's death at the Daytona was the first reprint in the book to grab me by the lapels of my T-shirt. The discussion of the Honolulu Marathon raises a point so amazing I can't believe I hadn't read it elsewhere before -- in what other sport do professionals and amateurs compete on the same course and the same time?
I wish the editing of "Hey Rube" had been a bit tighter. The back cover blurb promises "critics' favorites, and never-before-published columns"... without identifying inside the book which is which. The first "Hey Rube", from November 2000, is printed out of sequence and highlighted on a gray background.... and that's the only column in the collection to be given special treatment.
Finally, the paperback ends in mid-October 2003, not compiling the balance of HST's columns through February 2005. We thus miss his take on the 2006 Presidential election. Did Kerry win? Did Doc cover the 3-point popular vote spread? ESPN.com still has these final columns archived. Read more than a year after the release of the hardcover, the paperback edition of "Hey Rube" is a book without an ending.
3 stars (Not what I expected, but I didn't know what to expect) - I've never read anything by Hunter Thompson, but had heard about this book and of course about his suicide. I thought this book would be more about politics, and there was that, but there was also a lot of rambling about sports and gambling and Sean Penn. It was all interesting enough, but maybe a collection of ESPN.com columns is not where I should have started reading Dr Thompson's works. Nonetheless, I did find it diverting enough to read the whole thing. I feel like my horizons have been expanded just a bit, as this is not the sort of thing I usually read.
Still, if you're a fan of his, you'll clearly enjoy this book, as evidenced by the glowing praise from other readers.
5 stars (What do to with the medium?) - Had cyberspace existed in the 1960's, HST may very well never have ventured into journalism or published his first work. The siren song of a late night binge and free access to a blogger could have kept the good doctor mired in obscurity.
The Rum Diary wasn't published until after Fear and Loathing's success after all.
What does one say about Ouroboros's last digestion? I rate it high simply because it's the Doc and it could be a poem written on prison toilet paper and yet it's still be the last work of HST, and you can whine that it's free off of the Internet and that the Thompson estate needs no more money to keep Anita in flip flops, but I bought it anyway and love it because, unlike cached web pages, the book will stay on my library shelf until it succumbs to the elements. |
