He comes between a wild colleague and the equally unbuttoned young Connecticut girl he has brought out to visit him, and the end is a youth's easy-won nostalgia for a silly, drunken time. He gets involved in a drunken fight with the police, is thrown in jail, bailed out and goes in for a little shame-faced PR writing. He observes the island, as the invasion of American tourists and values is just beginning to change its lazy, sun-struck character. An introduction sets the scene, and the novel that follows is almost equally documentary in tone: young Kemp comes aboard at the News, gets to know its perpetually embattled proprietor and some of his feckless staff. It is very much a young man's book, clearly based on Thompson's own situation and some of the people-mostly drunks and layabouts-who gravitated to a loosely supervised journalistic stint in the tropics. This is a brilliant tribal study and a bone in the throat of all decent people.When the celebrated iconoclast was a feisty kid working for an English-language newspaper in San Juan 40 years ago, he wrote, and then put aside, a novel, which is here resurrected. But it is a world that Hunter Thompson knows in the nerves of his neck. "The Run Diary shows a side of human nature that is ugly and wrong. There, too were the beginnings of his future as a masterful prose stylist." -William Kennedy, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Ironweed Thompson would use in the years ahead-bizarre wit, mockery without end, redundant excess, supreme self-confidence, the narrative of the wounded meritorious ego, and the idiopathic anger of the righteous outlaw-were all there in his precocious imagination in San Juan. “Thompson flashes signs of the vitriol that would later be turned loose on society.” - USA Today a languid and lovingly executed book that reveals its emotional depths slowly." - Salon
"A remarkably full and mature first novel. with a kind of pride." - The Washington Post Book World The Rum Diary gives us this side of him without apology. “At the core of this hard-drinking, hard-talking, hard-living man is a moralist, Puritan, even an innocent. Reveals a young Hunter Thompson brimming with talent.” - The Philadelphia Inquirer “Enough booze to float a yacht and enough fear and loathing to sink it.” - New York Daily News A shot of Gonzo with a rum chaser.” - San Francisco Chronicle “Crackling, twisted, searing, paced to a deft prose rhythm.
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