'Most smart people tend to feel queasy when the conversation turns to things like certain death and total failure and the idea of a doomed generation. But not me. I am comfortable with these themes.'

Hunter S. Thompson, celebrated author of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, has been writing a weekly column for the San Francisco Examiner for the last two years. Those columns are collected here to offer a chronicle of the adventures of a Generation of Swine.

The incomparable 'Dr Gonzo' has journeyed no small distance in search of intelligent life and reports back, instead, on the demented state of current events. He keeps tabs on the 1998 presidential race, quotes from the Bible (reference books in hotel rooms are supplied exclusively by the Gideons) and asks why the President appears to be a hundred and twenty-eight years old.

'He is working from a dementia that no one in his right mind would want to share. It is the dementia, however, that makes Thompson great' Playboy

'His hallucinated vision strikes one as having been, after all, the sanest' Nelson Algren