"Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas"

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Ruth is the leader, and the theme is modern humor classics that face an uncaring, sometimes cruel world with wit and courage. Hunter S. Thompson (1937-2005) was the founder of "gonzo journalism", a style of writing that blurs distinctions between fiction and nonfiction, and is arguably the godfather of bloggers. Tom Wolfe, writing for the Wall St. Journal two days after Thompson's suicide, described the latter's style as "... part journalism and part personal memoir admixed with powers of wild invention and wilder rhetoric". Thompson remains best known for this book, first serialized in 1971 in Rolling Stone magazine, in which he grapples with the implications of what he considered the failure of the 1960s counterculture movement and the decline of the American Dream.. It has been adapted on film twice: loosely in "Where the Buffalo Roam" (1980) starring Bill Murray as Thompson, and directly in 1998 by director Terry Gilliam in a film starring Johnny Depp as Raoul Duke (Thompson) and Benicio del Toro as Dr. Gonzo, his Samoan attorney. The basic premise is that the two are in Vegas to report on the Mint 400 motorcycle race for an unnamed magazine. Use of various controlled substances, however, impedes their work and leads to bizarre, often hilarious episodes. The famous opening line gives a hint of what's to come: “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.”