The "60's," which ran from 1965 to 1974, brought forth a fresh, raw journalism appropriate to the general abandon…. Hunter Thompson is indisputably a hugely important sociological phenomenon. The age's distinctive feature was iconoclasm—anyone in a position of authority was presumptively engaged in nefarious enterprise…. So it was iconoclasm and a personal hedonism expressed in sex, drugs—and rhetoric. (p. 1)

[What] emerges with a most awful vividness from ["The Great Shark Hunt"], presented as a chrestomathy by the most highly accredited bard of the period, is a very nearly unrelieved distemper, and this, along with the tintinnabulary drugs, is so markedly the Sign of Thompson that to fail to give it due emphasis would be to fail to remark Jimmy Durante's nose.

Alas, it is lacking in flavor. Or at least such is the impression of any reader familiar, say, with the vituperative art of Westbrook Pegler, or John...