![]() ![]() ![]() What became abundantly clear quite early in his Air Force hitch was that his interests and intellectual honesty were not well suited for a military establishment. He never graduated high school as a result, but found his stride as a writer while in the military. ![]() Air Force after his release from a 60 day sentence (31 days served) for accessory to robbery. Thompson was a high school dropout due – not surprisingly – to delinquency and a criminal conviction. The 1960s and ’70s were times of social upheaval wrapped in an unpopular war that ignited a new generation looking to break the molds of its predecessors. Thompson was a journalist at a time when society was going through a number of monumental changes. The journalism included in The Great Shark Hunt harken back to a day when any behavior was fair game. With the constant references and first-party accounts of repeated drug use, Thompson’s are not the kind of books you leave lying around for your impressionable school-age children to read. It is crazy, off the rails, irreverent, pointed, and irresponsible. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed the unorthodox way Thompson lived and wrote his subject matter. Thompson describing the journalistic technique of living a story to the point where you become part of the story itself. To be honest, I didn’t expect to get much of value out of my first foray into the world of Gonzo Journalism, a phrase coined by Hunter S. ![]()
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