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Karla Dee (6 KP) rated Bad City: Peril and Power in the City of Angels in Books

Aug 26, 2022  
BC
Bad City: Peril and Power in the City of Angels
Paul Pringle | 2022
10
10.0 (1 Ratings)
Book Rating
My prima just moved back to the midwest after being in hollywood and wow did I hear some stories about dark hollwood, woah! I can't share that business but I can share what I read in this book about a Doctor who uses his power and money to control heroine and meth addicts in Cali. I love how the author pursues this story even though the whole city and all the magazine editors are in the Doctors pocket. Honestly the city of Pasadena seemed very nice and bougie before Paul Pringle exposed the city hall and the police department in having covered up an overdose where a girl could have died. A good Samaritan working at the hotel tipped off authorities which led to Pringle finding about the case and believing that there is a cover up. Pringle's persistence in getting a well to do university to talk and the police department to write up a report they had ignored at first just shows a little of his badass detective work. Def recommend reading the whole report aka book <3
  
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Sass Perilla (36 KP) rated Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream in Books

Aug 9, 2019  
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream
Hunter S. Thompson, Ralph Steadman | 2015 | Fiction & Poetry
9
8.4 (13 Ratings)
Book Rating
Hilarious, observant and inventive. (0 more)
The casual use of racist, misogynist (all the ists really) language really dates the writing. (0 more)
What's not to like (other than the casual prejudice)?
Contains spoilers, click to show
Okay, so I am one of those people who definitely saw the film before I read the book (and having now done the background reading I am even more impressed with Gilliam’s direction which uses some seriously creative camera angles to replicate the constantly expanding and contracting drug dependent points of view).
Whilst I understand that America’s post counter-culture, folksy racism/ misogyny/ homophobia [insert prejudice here] is subject to criticism by the author, there was more than one occasion where I found the discriminatory language jarringly unnecessary. It really dates the piece.
That said, on the whole, this is a really excellent read, and I was in equal parts disgusted and amused by the antics, and found myself (to some degree of shame) identifying with some of the scrapes and situations the Doctor of Journalism and his legal crony got themselves into- I mean who hasn’t found a casualty or two in their bathrooms following an impromptu house party? (Although I do wonder how events might read to those who avoided misspending their youth...)
It’s a short, pithy searing indictment of American culture, society and the tacit implication (or actually come to think of it- pretty explicit statement) that substance abuse is the only way to deal with and make sense of the chaos. So, one could argue, still pretty relevant.
Violence is frequently a first recourse, the idealisation of capitalism is metaphorically “burned to the ground” (yet antithetically also a cause for admiration) and towards the end a primate bites into an old man’s skull. What’s not to like?