What Thompson would likely find to be the two most cutting blows to his legend are when Cowan reveals he was a terrible shot, and he called on friends to help with his writing. The latter included Cowan himself, who not only “patch[ed] together the random notes and recent clutter” when Thompson was “wasted and tired after days of being up,” but he also says he “created big chunks of columns from whole cloth with only Hunter’s mumbles and gestures and orphaned sentences to go on” and then worked with San Francisco Examiner editor David Burgin to get the pieces ready for print. While certainly believable and likely not unique, it will still be disappointing to his fans.
Cowan concludes the book with a final sentence that seems a great summation of Thompson as “just another dazed and mortally flawed human: the true believer, the hopeful romantic, the King of Fun, the last honest man, the true sport, the guy who always bets his heart and knows it’s wrong but can’t stop himself.”
As a fan of Thompson’s work, I enjoyed seeing Cowan’s portrait. He’s does a great job creating scenes with his words and appears to cover the gamut of Thompson’s life and his death. However, I had one issue with the book in that it quotes Thompson from a lot of conversations the two had. The accuracy is hard to believe since some instances took place almost 40 years ago, and I couldn’t describe a phone call I had yesterday. Obviously these are Cowan’s remembrances and there’s likely some latitude in a memoir, but it still gave me pause as I read it.
Article comments
1 - tink
Just put this on my must read list.
Thanks!
2 - El Bicho
glad I could help persuade you