The Rum Diary

"The Run Diary shows a side of human nature that is ugly and wrong. But it is a world that Hunter Thompson knows in the nerves of his neck. This is a brilliant tribal study and a bone in the throat of all decent people." --Jimmy Buffett "The tools Hunter S. Thompson would use in the years ahead-bizarre wit, mockery without end, redundant excess, supreme self-confidence, the narrative of the wounded meritorious ego, and the idiopathic anger of the righteous outlaw--were all there in his precocious imagination in San Juan. There, too were the beginnings of his future as a masterful prose stylist." --William Kennedy, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Ironweed "Thompson flashes signs of the vitriol that would later be turned loose on society." --USA Today "A remarkably full and mature first novel . . . a languid and lovingly executed book that reveals its emotional depths slowly." --Salon "At the core of this hard-drinking, hard-talking, hard-living man is a moralist, Puritan, even an innocent. The Rum Diary gives us this side of him without apology . . . with a kind of pride." --The Washington Post Book World "A great and an unexpected joy . . . Reveals a young Hunter Thompson brimming with talent." --The Philadelphia Inquirer "Enough booze to float a yacht and enough fear and loathing to sink it." --New York Daily News "Crackling, twisted, searing, paced to a deft prose rhythm . . . A shot of Gonzo with a rum chaser." --San Francisco Chronicle