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I'm fond of the "oral biography" format, and I'm a fan of some of Thompson's work (and full disclosure: I used to be ga-ga over his stuff in my youth). I was a little worried that Wenner would make the book sort of self-serving and maybe it is a little, but I thought overall this was very well done.

Not surprisingly, Thompson spends a lot of time being appalling to people. And I didn't realize how little productive time there was in his life. The drugs and alcohol really did limit him very quickly, it seemed to me. One thing that struck me was the sheer number of people needed for him to get any writing finished. Editors and assistants and friends constantly and literally standing by to keep him on track. His first wife Sandy seems to be the only one who is ultimately clear-eyed about his abusiveness.

I suppose it's a common-enough story -- a famous person who is surrounded by people who won't stand up to him or are only interested in the hijinks or something. But the thing that stands out here to me is the huge number of people who express genuine affection for Thompson--not only for his genius, but his generosity, warmth, charm--and still go to great lengths to satisfy his every whim. It doesn't seem to occur to any of them to let him fall, that Al-Anon-approved first step to dealing with addiction. The book makes clear over and over how extraordinarily dependent he was on people for every single little mundane aspect of his life. He was, apparently, never alone. And even though it seems like many of those people loved him and worried about him, they never let him hit rock bottom.

That's easy to say -- with a beloved famous person, there will probably always be somebody to do the shit work, even if your friends abandon you. And maybe there were tons of people who walked away from him, and they weren't in the book...

Anyway, he had obvious gifts, but it's too bad that he never seemed to be able to put aside his legend and his addictions and move on to other things.