The Great Shark Hunt, by Hunter S. Thompson

Here’s another cheat review – this book is also a paperback, rather than a Kindle title, and one that I purchased back in Chiang Mai in a very cool place called Backstreet Books.

I was a huge fan of Hunter S. Thompson when I was younger and as such I have a tattoo of his Gonzo fist on my left forearm. Although I don’t read him much these days, I still consider him one of my primary literary influences. Perhaps I felt that, after several years of not reading his work, he was not as great as I remembered… perhaps his work was a tad childish, even.

How wrong I was. A few weeks ago, in Laos, I got stuck into The Great Shark Hunt – a collection of Thompson’s finest work before 1980. Indeed, this was his best period as a writer, when he wrote his masterpiece, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, as well as the brilliant Hell’s Angels and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72. This was Thompson at his peak, particularly documenting the counterculture of the late sixties and its subsequent demise, as well as his constant hatred for Richard Nixon.

The Great Shark Hunt chronicles the development of Gonzo, Thompson’s signature style. Although the book doesn’t follow any chronological pattern, the stories are dated, and we see him becoming increasing politicized, as well as finding his way from off-beat reporter to Gonzo journalist. His early works were short and somewhat restrained, while later they become rambling and filled with vitriol and humour.

What I found rereading Thompson’s best works was a profound sense that this is a man who understood the rhythm of speech, and that his work was to some extent intended to be read aloud. A few weeks before buying this book I watched some videos on YouTube wherein other people read his work, and I noticed for the first time just how he laughed at certain points, and how he loved to hear his words being read aloud.

In Thompson’s writing there is something – and I know he would’ve hated the comparison – Ginsbergian in the long-breath sentences. He was famous for his overuse of certain words (like doomed, swine, and atavistic) but his brilliance lay not in overstatement or shock, but in the subtle building of feeling and emotion in his sentences. There is a famous story of him typing out The Great Gatsby to get a feel for the prose, and indeed Thompson’s own work is now similarly copied by hordes of imitation Gonzo writers because he succeeded. In places, his work is as beautiful as any great American literature.

There are no weak links in this collection, although there are sometimes a few paragraphs of pages where the quality drops slightly. Yet this vast, dense volume is one of the great writers of the late twentieth century on his very best form and it is, for anyone interested in Thompson or Gonzo, an absolute must-read book. 

Unspotted, by Justin Fox

Unspotted, by Justin Fox, is a very short non-fiction book in which the author goes in search of the highly elusive Cape Leopard. It is written in a first person – perhaps even a Gonzo – style of narrative. Fox takes us along on this personal journey, investing the reader quite firmly in his own quest to see a rare animal in the wild. Yet it is not some self-involved, Gonzo rip-off. Fox deftly handles his story, providing vivid, enthralling descriptions of the South African landscape with amusing observations and dialogues along the way.

I very much enjoyed Fox’s writing style, which was always a balance of informative and comedic (“The vehicle bounced over boulders like an inebriated frog.”). I was in Southern Africa for a few months earlier this year and developed a strong fondness for the land, the people, and the wildlife. Fox’s book brought me right back into that place, and made me yearn to hike out into the wilds once again, despite the author’s own apparent disdain for physical activity.

Although I’m a slow reader, I made my way through this short text in one sitting. Apparently this is philosophy behind the book’s publisher, Annorlunda Books, which specializes in “novella length or shorter” for both fiction and non-fiction. I dig the concept and will check out more of their books in future. 

The Men Who Stare at Goats, by Jon Ronson

Readers of this blog will know that I've been working my way through the works of Jon Ronson, pretty much going backwards from his most recent book, and now I have ended up with his most famous, 2004's now-classic The Men Who Stare at Goats.



Jon Ronson is a journalist who likes to document the weird, and he seems to come across as trustworthy enough that he can get close to the real weirdos in life. Yet this is probably his most bizarre book in a career of dealing with bizarre people. It is, as the title suggests, about men who believe they can kill goats by staring at them.

The story goes back to 1979, the US government established a team of commandos who would be tasked with developing super-human abilities like invisibility and psychic investigation. They would also be able to walk through walls and stare goats to death.

He traces the history of this movement through painstaking research. Most people would have given up, but Ronson followed the story to its weirdest extents, and details it in his own Gonzo fashion. He brings it right up into the present day (for 2004, at least) and the War on Terror.

This book is a modern classic - hilarious, informative, and unputdownable. 

Them: Adventures with Extremists, by Jon Ronson

Lately I've been on a bit of a Jon Ronson binge. I first read his book, So You've Been Publicly Shamed, and then worked through The Psychopath Test. Going back through his bibliography I've now gotten to Them: Adventures with Extremists.

I really like Ronson's style. I was a huge fan of Hunter S. Thompson and although it might seem a bizarre comparison, I like Ronson for the same reasons. He may be timid and neurotic and full of self-doubt - the very opposite of Thompson - but their penchant for adventure and ability to weave a narrative is inspiring.

In this outing, Ronson goes, as the title suggests, on adventures with extremists. And he's not being liberal with his use of the word "adventure." He is outed as a Jew at a jihadi training center, followed by security agents for the world's most secretive elite, and infiltrates the Bilderberg group with a pre-fame Alex Jones.

What I love about Ronson is his ability to humanize the weirdos. Not just weirdos, but people that you really, really want to hate. In this book he tackles Islamic fundamentalists, the Ku Klux Klan, and conspiracy theorists. He paints them in a sympathetic light, causing the reader to laugh gently and perhaps wonder what went wrong to make these people the way they now are.

Ronson also weaves his stories well - connecting seemingly disparate strands. In this book he connects all these extremists not by the fact that they're seemingly crazy or evil, but rather by seeing similarities in their viewpoints and following that story to its logical and, frankly, exciting finale. 

The Psychopath Test, by Jon Ronson

A few weeks ago I read Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Shamed and I was so impressed that I thought I’d read another of his books. For a year now one of my friends has been trying to get me to read The Psychopath Test and it certainly sounded interesting, so last week I downloaded it onto my Kindle and began reading.

Like the author, I wasn’t entirely sure what a psychopath was at the beginning of his adventure. Of course, I knew a few things. Psychopath is a bit of a buzzword. But I didn’t know, for example, that it’s used interchangeably with “sociopath,” or what exactly constituted either a psycho- or sociopath.

At the beginning of the book, Ronson is thrown into a bit of a mystery. It’s his style to engage with the subject of his research and to follow a story wherever it goes, putting himself thoroughly into the narrative. I quite enjoyed that in So You’ve Been Shamed. One of my literary heroes, after all, is Hunter S. Thompson, who was a one-man Gonzo genre.

Yet, for me, Ronson’s insertion of himself can be a little annoying at times. Whereas Thompson was larger than life and did it partially for comic reasons, Ronson is, like me, a fairly quiet and anxious person. Moreover, he seems to leave very little out of the book. At the end, in the acknowledgments, he thanks an editor for removing a few lines and I wondered if that’s all that was ever excised from the book. But it was an engaging read, nonetheless. Ronson’s story wandered hither and thither but it was always interesting, even if you were sometimes left wondering when you’d come back to the idea of psychopathy.

Like Ronson, learning about psychopathy made me wonder: Am I a psychopath? When he introduced the Bob Hare checklist that essentially determines whether or not a person is a psychopath, I found myself applying it to myself. Even after an expert in the book tells us that wondering whether or not you’re a psychopath is a sure sign that you aren’t, I still found myself wondering.

Oddly enough, I must admit, I kind of wanted to find myself out as a psychopath… One of the key notions of the book is that psychopaths walk among us, not necessarily hidden the shadows looking for someone to rape or kill, but in plain sight: they are often highly successful people. They are successful because they aren’t held back by guilt and empathy.

In the end, I had to admit to myself I just wasn’t psychopath material. I guess if I want to be successful I’ll have to go forth with guilt and empathy holding me back.

I was interested to learn, however, that I do know one genuine psychopath. I dated her for a year quite recently. I actually called her a “sociopath” at one point and thought of her as such on a few occasions, although I didn’t truly know the word’s meaning. She does, however, check most of the boxes on Hare’s checklist. Given that fewer than one in a hundred people are psychopaths, I found that frightening and yet amazing.

Despite my criticism of its rambling narrative, Ronson’s book is very readable. It doesn’t wander too far from the point, and is always fascinating. I highly recommend it to anyone wanting to better understand the human mind.