Politics and government

Hey Rube - Blood Sport- the Bush Doctrine- and the Downward Spiral of Dumbness Modern History from

4 stars (When the Going Gets Weird) - Reading "Hey Rube" is a bit of a disorienting experience. Doc narrates his gambling-man take on parts of four different football seasons, and it all starts to run together long before the paperback concludes on page 243. Honestly, by the end, I couldn't keep track of who had won which Super Bowl, and whether or not HST beat the point spread. Are the Raiders still in the league? Reading a collection of ESPN.com colums covering November 2000 through October 2003 in something far quicker than real time is perhaps not the way Hunter S. Thompson is meant to be read. The columns that stuck in my memory, oddly enough, were not the Gonzo columns (except for the stories about Prince "Omar" running through the 2001 World Series). The single column take on Dale Earnhardt's death at the Daytona was the first reprint in the book to grab me by the lapels of my T-shirt. The discussion of the Honolulu Marathon raises a point so amazing I can't believe I hadn't read it elsewhere before -- in what other sport do professionals and amateurs compete on the same course and the same time? I wish the editing of "Hey Rube" had been a bit tighter. The back cover blurb promises "critics' favorites, and never-before-published columns"... without identifying inside the book which is which. The first "Hey Rube", from November 2000, is printed out of sequence and highlighted on a gray background.... and that's the only column in the collection to be given special treatment. Finally, the paperback ends in mid-October 2003, not compiling the balance of HST's columns through February 2005. We thus miss his take on the 2004 Presidential election. Did Kerry win? Did Doc cover the 3-point popular vote spread? ESPN.com still has these final columns archived. Read more than a year after the release of the hardcover, the paperback edition of "Hey Rube" is a book without an ending. 3 stars (Not what I expected, but I didn't know what to expect) - I've n...
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