Summary of Timothy Denevi's Freak Kingdom

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 Hunter S. Thompson, a journalist, was shocked by the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He had become a Kennedy enthusiast three years earlier after watching the first televised presidential debate.
#2 Thompson’s reaction to the assassination was to begin collecting firsthand testimony from people in Dealey Plaza, which he sent to his editor at the National Observer. He was afraid that America had been attacked by the very threat its most conservative politicians had been shouting about for decades.
#3 The death of President Kennedy seemed to offer the country the ideal catalyst for national suicide. The following year, Nixon revealed himself to be the narcissistic and petulant hypocrite he’d always been.
#4 The assassination of President Kennedy marked a turning point for Thompson. He decided to devote himself to journalism, and he offered a personal articulation of the tragedy: There is no human being within 500 miles to whom I can communicate anything, he wrote, much less the fear and loathing that is on me after today’s murder.

Sujets

• Literary Figures
• Lettres et linguistique
• Biography
• Autobiography

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 07 juin 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9798822527539
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Timothy Denevi's Freak Kingdom
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4 Insights from Chapter 5 Insights from Chapter 6
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

Hunter S. Thompson, a journalist, was shocked by the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He had become a Kennedy enthusiast three years earlier after watching the first televised presidential debate.

#2

Thompson’s reaction to the assassination was to begin collecting firsthand testimony from people in Dealey Plaza, which he sent to his editor at the National Observer. He was afraid that America had been attacked by the very threat its most conservative politicians had been shouting about for decades.

#3

The death of President Kennedy seemed to offer the country the ideal catalyst for national suicide. The following year, Nixon revealed himself to be the narcissistic and petulant hypocrite he’d always been.

#4

The assassination of President Kennedy marked a turning point for Thompson. He decided to devote himself to journalism, and he offered a personal articulation of the tragedy: There is no human being within 500 miles to whom I can communicate anything, he wrote, much less the fear and loathing that is on me after today’s murder.

#5

The Thompsons moved to California in 1964. They’d been married for less than a year, and their relationship seemed healthy. But when they arrived in Glen Ellen, they were told that they had been promised a cottage, but someone else had taken it. They had nowhere to go.

#6

In the aftermath of Kennedy’s death, Hunter was overwhelmed by the things he hadn’t yet accomplished. He was unable to concentrate, and felt like he was falling deeper into debt and depression.

#7

Bob Geiger and Hunter Thompson began to spend time together, and as spring gave way to the dry season, they found themselves thinking about making a trip to Mississippi to register voters with the Freedom Riders.

#8

The author, Hunter Thompson, and his doctor, Bob Geiger, used Dexedrine to help them through the stressful move to Sonoma. It was a trade version of the psychostimulant amphetamine, and it helped them bridge the gap between ambition and productivity.

#9

Thompson’s first major reporting trip after moving to Idaho in 1962 was to Ketchum, Idaho, to interview the suicide victim and Nobel Prize–winning author Ernest Hemingway. He concluded that it was not just a writer’s crisis, but also the most obvious victims because the function of art is to bring order out of chaos.

#10

The twenty-eighth Republican National Convention was held in San Francisco in July 1964. Hunter Thompson attended as a journalist and observer, and was amazed by the transformation of Dwight Eisenhower, the symbol of the American 1950s, into irrelevance.

#11

Goldwater had arrived in San Francisco ready to reiterate his answer to the question that would dominate the 1964 presidential election: how much risk is the United States willing to take, domestically and abroad. He voted no on the Civil Rights Act, and called for an open confrontation with communism.

#12

The Cow Palace erupted when Rockefeller was announced. The thousands howling refused to let up. In them Rockefeller saw a dangerous and cavalier disregard, and by the way he raised his chin you could tell he hated them for it.

#13

Thompson was at the 1964 Republican National Convention in San Francisco, exploring every inch of it with such cartographical thoroughness that it was as if his goal had always been to record its exact shape for a generation of people he’d never meet.

#14

The convention was heavy on rhetoric about law and order, security, and liberty. But the real shock came during Goldwater’s speech, when he stated that extremism in defense of liberty is not a vice.

#15

When Goldwater made his acceptance speech, he seemed to be speaking from the heart, and the delegates responded with their collective version of the same profound sincerity. Someone like Goldwater might have been espousing a dangerous ideology, but beneath it all was a consistency that hinted at something more: promises kept and a mutual and ancient devotion called love.

#16

Richard Nixon would never be loved like that. He was incapable of eliciting the sincerity that Goldwater’s supporters had expressed, because he lacked this trait from the start.

#17

Thompson had been at the Republican convention in San Francisco, and he had seen the first act in the drama he’d been sure was coming. He was looking for a new job, and he wanted to be closer to the Bay Area’s fast-moving political and cultural developments.

#18

The Thompsons’ brief Sonoma stay ended in September, when the Geigers helped them move to San Francisco. They had found an apartment there on Parnassus Avenue, at the top of the Haight-Ashbury district.

#19

In September 1964, Thompson made the move to San Francisco from Sonoma. He had been put in trust by the people of Sonoma, and he felt like he had been put in trust by the people of San Francisco.