"Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" by Hunter S Thompson

 The classic story of a drug-fuelled trip to Las Vegas. It starts: "We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like 'I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive ...' And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car" 

HST was the proponent of 'Gonzo' journalism, described in wikipedia as "an energetic first-person participatory writing style in which the author is a protagonist," The writing is breathtakingly brilliant. This book reads like a combination of William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac. It is one heck of a rush. HST and his Attorney, assisted by cannabis, mescaline, LSD, cocaine , "a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers" and tequila, rum, beer, ether and amyls, funded by a generous expense account and assorted credit cards, drive fast cars, trash hotel rooms and indulge in riotous behaviour (including infiltrating a national law enforcement drugs conference) in a Las Vegas that seems staid and outdated. 

It certainly didn't encourage me to take drugs. The acid trips were horrendous, the encounter with adrenochrome in which the narrator is, bit by bit, paralyzed, uncertain whether his breathing will stop but unable to do anything, not even to move his eyes, is terrifying, and the repeated episodes of the Big Spit (vomiting) were enough to put me off drugs for life. The book also depicts the squalor and desperation of the drug-addict's life. Not to mention the fact that he could have gone to prison for ten or more years for what was in his luggage, not to mention the repeated fraudulent use of credit cards.

But I am old and over-cautious. Isn't it odd that the older you get the more risk-averse you get. The young have so much to lose and I comparatively little but I am a bigger worrier than I was when I was young.

• "Luck is always important, especially in Las Vegas ... and ours was getting worse." (Ch 6)
• "Here there were more than a thousand top-level cops telling each other 'we must come to terms with the drug culture', but they had no idea where to start. They couldn't even find the goddam thing." (Ch 7)

Wow. March 2021; 202 pages

This review was written by 
the author of Motherdarling

"Down and Out in Paris and London" by George Orwell

A classic of proletarian literature. George Orwell writes so clearly about such dreadful conditions. As with The Road to Wigan Pier he combines acute observation with insightful social commentary.

He starts by being unemployed and hungry in Paris. So hungry he starts to starve. He finds a job as a plongeur (dishwasher plus sous chef) in a Paris hotel and later a restaurant: he works long hours at breakneck speed in atrocious conditions.

Brilliant lines include:

• “The Paris slums are a gathering-place for eccentric people - people who have fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves and given up trying to be normal or decent. poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work.” (p 3)
• “Comment épouser un soldat, moi qui aime tout le régiment?” (p 6)
• “And there is another feeling that is a great consolation in poverty. I believe everyone who has been hard up has experienced it. It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs - and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety.” (pp 16 - 17)
• “Hunger reduces one to an utterly spineless, brainless condition, more like the after-effects of influenza than anything else.” (p 36)
• “You're not fit to scrub floors in the brothel your mother came from.” (p 68)
• “The pace would never be kept up if everybody did not accuse everybody else of idling.” (p 74)
• “It is the pride of the drudge - the man who is equal to no matter what quantity of work. At that level, the mere power to go on working like an ox is about the only virtue attainable. Debrouillard is what every plongeur wants to be called. A debrouillard is a man who, even when he is told to do the impossible, will se debrouiller - get it done somehow.” (p 77)
• “Mario ... had the typical drudge mentality. All he thought of was getting through ... and he decide you to give him too much of it. Fourteen years underground had left him with about as much natural laziness as a piston rod.” (p 77)
• “Roughly speaking, the more one pays for food, the more sweat and spittle one is obliged to eat with it.” (p 79)
• “For many men in the quarter, unmarried and with no future to think of, the weekly drinking-bout was the one thing that made life worth living.” (p 96)
• “Sharp knives, of course, are the secret of a successful restaurant.” (p 116)
• “A ‘smart’ hotel is a place where a hundred people toil like devils in order that two hundred may pay through the nose for things they do not really want.” (p 119)
• “A slave, Marcus Cato said, should be working when he is not sleeping. It does not matter whether his work is needed or not, he must work, because work in itself is good - for slaves, at least. ... I believe that this instinct to perpetuate useless work is, at bottom, simply fear of the mob. The mob (the thought runs) are such low animals that they would be dangerous if they had leisure; it is safer to keep them to busy to think.” (p 120)
• “Fear of the mob is a superstitious fear. It is based on the idea that there is some fundamental difference between rich and poor ... the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit.” (p 121)
• “I saw a hang-dog man, obviously a tramp, coming towards me, and when I looked again it was myself, reflected in a shop window.” (p 130)
• “Dirt is a great respecter of persons; it lets you alone when you are well dressed, but as soon as your collar is gone it flies towards you from all directions.” (p 130) 
• “I noticed, too, how the attitude of women varies with a man's clothes. When a badly dressed man passes them they shudder away from him with a quite frank movement of disgust, as though he were a dead cat.” (p 130)
• “Dressed in a tramps clothes it is very difficult, at any rate for the first day, not to feel that you are genuinely degraded.” (p 130)
• “He could pronounce the words ‘the dear Lord Jesus’ with less sham than anyone I ever saw. No doubt he had learned the knack in prison.” (p 142)
• “Flat feet, pot bellies, hollow chest, sagging muscles - every kind of physical rottenness was there.” (p 149)
• “How sweet the air does smell - even the air of a back-street in the suburbs - after the shut-in, subfaecal stench of the spike.” (p 149) 
• “De sight of all dat bloody print makes me sick.” (p 153)
• “He pined for work as an artist pines to be famous.” (p 153) 
• “You can have cartoons about any of the parties, but you mustn't put anything in favour of Socialism, because the police won't stand it.” (p 164)
• “Have you ever seen a corpse burned? ... They put the old chap on the fire, and the next moment ... he's started kicking. It was only his muscles contracting in the heat - still, it gave me a turn. Well, he wriggled about for a bit like a kipper on hot coals, and then his belly blew up and went off with a bang you could have heard fifty yards away.” (p 169)
• “The sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him.” (p 169)
• “Money has become the grand test of virtue. By this test beggars fail, and for this they are despised.” (p 175) 
• “Of its very nature swearing is as irrational as magic - indeed, it is a species of magic.” (p 178)
• “It was an evangelical church, gaunt and wilfully ugly.” (p 184)

Orwell writes so clearly; some of his descriptions are masterpieces. I loved the women "shuddering" away from the tramp "as though he were a dead cat". The verb is simple but accurate; it conveys a whole movement and emotion; the simile is spot on. There were characters in here who are as three dimensional as they would be if you met them on the street. There is no plot as such, but the everyday experiences kept me turning the pages. 

A wonderful piece of writing. October 2017; 216 pages

My review of Michael Shelden's biography of Orwell can be found here.

Other books by Orwell include:

• Homage to Catalonia, his memoir of the Spanish civil war
• Animal Farm
• 1984

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Road to Wigan Pier" by George Orwell

A classic of proletarian literature.

Orwell liked political discourse. His most famous novel, 1984, contains a long extract from a political tract written by the arch enemy of Ing Soc. This book starts with wonderful journalism, describing working class life in the north of England between the two world wars, and ends with several chapters of tedious, probably outdated, politics.

But it starts brilliantly with a description of a filthy tripe shop cum lodging house in which OAPs subsist in shared bedrooms an bread and butter imprinted with the filthy thumbprint of the landlord. Despite receiving a pension, without extra savings an OAP cannot survive on their own. Nor can they live with a son or daughter if that person is unemployed and on the dole because if they do so they will be counted as a lodger and the dole will be reduced to the extent where the whole family will starve. So they have to eke out their sunset years in undignified misery.

The book continues with wonderful descriptions and haunting images of poverty. He describes a slum girl, glimpsed momentarily from a train, whose face wears "the most desolate, hopeless expression I have ever seen ... she knew well enough what was happening to her." He uses this image to refute the concept that the lower orders are dumb brutes and don't mind poverty and squalor.

He also admires the "superhuman" coal miners ("The miners' job would be as much beyond my power as it would be to perform on the flying trapeze") with "their noble bodies". But in very hot mines, where it is necessary to go about half-naked, most of the miners have what they call 'buttons down the back' - that is, a permanent scar on each vertebra" from not bending low enough when they are crouching through the tunnels. They are also tattooed: "Every miner has blue scars on his nose and forehead, and will carry them to his death. The coal dust of which the air underground is full enters every cut, and then the skin grows over it and forms a blue stain like tattooing, which in fact it is."

He draws the following lessons:

• "It is so with all types of manual work; it keeps us alive, and we are oblivious of its existence."
• Educated bourgeois are no more gifted than anybody else but "have the cheek necessary to a commander."
• "The price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt."

This first part of the book was so well-observed that it was mesmerising, like rubber-necking at the site of a car crash. But he can also turn a phrase:

• Dismissing conspiracy theories: "What I have seen of our governing classes does not convince me that they have that much intelligence."
• "Sheffield ... could justly claim to be the ugliest town in the Old World."
• "the dreary tribe of high-minded women and sandal-wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers who come flocking towards the smell of 'progress' like bluebottles to a dead cat."
• "A Yorkshire man in the South will always take care to let you know that he regards you as an inferior."
• Of self-made men: "Though he might be narrow-minded, sordid, ignorant, grasping and uncouth ... he knew how to make money."
• Of the way certain novelists depict women: "every married woman is an angel chained to a satyr.

Cut most of part two with its dreary politics and you will have a wonderfully written book, even more powerful (perhaps because it is journalism rather than fiction but probably because of the vivid description) that Walter Greenwood's Love on the Dole. These books need to be remembered so that Britain never again exploits its people as it did then.

Well worth reading. May 2016; 204 pages

Here is a review of Orwell's biography by Michael Shelden

Orwell also wrote a memoir of the Spanish Civil War called Homage to Catalonia, the political satire Animal Farm, and a memoir of time spent tramping in England and dishwashing in France called Down and Out in Paris and London.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Bad Science" by Ben Goldacre

This is a rant. It is witty and amusing and packed full of information but nevertheless it is a 16 chapter rant. Ben Goldacre is angry about nutritionists, homeopaths and assorted quacks but not because they are deluded crackpots who are making a fortune from deluding the public. Ben is angry because they bring Science and in particular evidence-based medicine into disrepute.



So as part of this rant Ben educates the reader about the placebo effect, regression to the mean, controls, double-blinds, cherry-picking, meta-analyses and funnel plots and a huge number of other tricks and techniques that make the difference between scientific evidence and wishful thinking. This book can be a little hard going at times but it is worth the effort.



There are gems of humour:

How does a water molecule know ... to treat my bruise with its memory of arnica, rather than a memory of Isaac Asimov's faeces? I wrote this in a newspaper once, and a homeopath complained to the Press Complaints Commission. It's not about the dilution, he said: it's the succussion. You have to bang the flask of water briskly ten times on a leather and horsehair surface, and that's what makes the water remember a molecule. Because I did not mention this, he explained, I had deliberately made homeopaths sound stupid. p36



He also attacks directly Dr Gillian McKeith PhD ("or, to give her her full medical title Gillian McKeith") who is a nutitionist who believes that dark leaved vegetables are good for you because the chloroplasts will oxygenate you (chloroplasts work in the presence of sunlight; "it's pretty dark in your bowels: in fact, if there's any light in there at all something's gone badly wrong" and even if there was, you don't want the methane in your gut to mix with oxygen unless you desire spontaneous human combustion). He attacks Professor Patrick Holford who says that there are now oranges containing no vitamin C (so buy my supplements) and he fiercely attacks Matthias Rath who has used advertising campaigns to persuade South Africans that AZT is bad for HIV sufferers and they should instead use his vitamin pills.



He also attacks big pharma for using distorted medical evidence to sell its products.



At the end he describes the MRSA hoax and the MMR vaccine scandal. Some time ago the press went to town about MRSA in British hospitals. Much of the evidence came from swabs that journalists sent to a single lab in Northamptonshire which turned out to be run by a man with a mail-order PhD who had set up his lab in a garden shed. The MMR scandal was based on a single, anecdotal paper; none of the controlled medical trials have found any evidence whatsoever to suggest that MMR causes autism.



So Ben perhaps reserves his greatest anger for journalists. When they "stood by" the MRSA lab analyst we had the scenario of "a tabloid journalist telling a department of world-class research microbiologists that they are mistaken about microbiology." p284.

This is what Ben believes: "the people who run the media are humanities graduates with little understanding of science, who wear their ignorance as a badge of honour. Secretly, deep down, perhaps they resent the fact that they have denied themselves access to the most significant developments in the history of Western thought from the past two hundred years; but there is an attack implicit in all media coverage of science: in their choice of stories, and the way they cover them, the media create a parody of science. On this template, science is portrayed as groundless, incomprehensible, didactic truth statements from scientists, who themselves are socially powerful, arbitrary, unelected authority figures. They are detached from reality; they do work that is either wacky or dangerous, but either way, everything in science is tenuous, contradictory, probably going to change soon and, most ridiculously 'hard to understand'." pp224-225

Ouch! This is scary stuff. How on earth do we counteract this? Scientists are used to being paid peanuts while arts graduates swan about doing sod all and earning much more. But this lazy journalistic parody is actually dangerous because it promotes quacks, cranks and crackpots which, in the end, kill people. Science is the only method of enquiry which has produced progression in our understanding of the world. We cannot afford to lose it.

At tne end Ben proposes a number of websites to look at to enthuse young people with the excitement and discipline of science: badscience.net would be a good place to start.

An important book.

August 2008, 339 pages