“This is more hype than book. It needs some humanity and a better understanding of what time it is. The book is in the zonked, road-writing tradition of Jack Kerouac, but it lacks Kerouac’s bleeding feelings. Despite some hip ironies and several funny episodes, Thompson’s world is loveless. People never become more than the one-faced drawings by Ralph Steadman which animate the book. Failing or unable to get beneath what he sees, Thompson is yet another carrier of journalism’s current typhus: he transmits surface description as analysis. When you can’t perceive, describe”
–The New Republic, October 14, 1972
