Author | Hunter S. Thompson |
---|---|
Publisher | Simon & Schuster |
Publication date | January 21, 2003 |
Pages | 356 |
ISBN | 0-684-87323-0 |
Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child In the Final Days of the American Century is a 2003 non-fiction book by American journalist and author Hunter S. Thompson. [1] [2] The book is a collection of writings about Thompson's past that focuses on the theme of rebellion against authority. Many of the stories are placed in the context of the aftermath of the September 11 attacks and its emphasis on heightened police and military operations. [3]
The book seems to begin as memoir or an autobiography, but rapidly devolves into numerous fragmented accounts of Thompson's exploits which could be termed as a type of Gonzo biography. There is a rough adherence to actual chronology though many events in the book are not in order. However, some continuity does exist throughout the work, for example, the "Witness" segments, dealing with Gail Palmer's sexual assault lawsuit against Thompson, appearing once every section in roughly the same area. In addition to these larger narratives, there are also several sections which hold no connection to each other in any way, with the exception of some of the same people or places from a previous section being mentioned.
Among the events, the ones which seem to be as closely related to Thompson's life include:
Writing and punctuation themes are more pronounced in Kingdom of Fear than in many of Thompson's previous works. In particular, he habitually uses the following alterations:
Thompson also used this style in the contemporary Hey Rube: Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine, and the Downward Spiral of Dumbness .
Hunter Stockton Thompson was an American journalist and author. He rose to prominence with the publication of Hell's Angels (1967), a book for which he spent a year living with the Hells Angels motorcycle club to write a first-hand account of their lives and experiences. In 1970, he wrote an unconventional article titled "The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved" for Scanlan's Monthly, which further raised his profile as a countercultural figure. It also set him on the path to establishing his own subgenre of New Journalism that he called "Gonzo", a journalistic style in which the writer becomes a central figure and participant in the events of the narrative.
A crossword is a word game consisting of a grid of black and white squares, into which solvers enter words or phrases ("entries") crossing each other horizontally ("across") and vertically ("down") according to a set of clues. Each white square is typically filled with one letter, while the black squares are used to separate entries. The first white square in each entry is typically numbered to correspond to its clue.
Phreaking is a slang term coined to describe the activity of a culture of people who study, experiment with, or explore telecommunication systems, such as equipment and systems connected to public telephone networks. The term phreak is a sensational spelling of the word freak with the ph- from phone, and may also refer to the use of various audio frequencies to manipulate a phone system. Phreak, phreaker, or phone phreak are names used for and by individuals who participate in phreaking.
A scam, or a confidence trick, is an attempt to defraud a person or group after first gaining their trust. Confidence tricks exploit victims using a combination of the victim's credulity, naïveté, compassion, vanity, confidence, irresponsibility, and greed. Researchers have defined confidence tricks as "a distinctive species of fraudulent conduct ... intending to further voluntary exchanges that are not mutually beneficial", as they "benefit con operators at the expense of their victims ".
A null cipher, also known as concealment cipher, is an ancient form of encryption where the plaintext is mixed with a large amount of non-cipher material. Today it is regarded as a simple form of steganography, which can be used to hide ciphertext.
On March 1, 1932, Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr., the 20-month-old son of colonel Charles Lindbergh and his wife, aviatrix and author Anne Morrow Lindbergh, was murdered after being abducted from his crib in the upper floor of the Lindberghs' home, Highfields, in East Amwell, New Jersey, United States. On May 12, the child's corpse was discovered by a truck driver by the side of a nearby road.
United States v. X-Citement Video, Inc., 513 U.S. 64 (1994), was a federal criminal prosecution filed in the United States District Court for the Central District of California in Los Angeles against X-Citement Video and its owner, Rubin Gottesman, on three charges of trafficking in child pornography, specifically videos featuring the underaged Traci Lords. In 1989, a federal judge found Gottesman guilty and later sentenced him to one year in jail and a $100,000 fine.
Masquerade is a picture book, written and illustrated by Kit Williams and published in August 1979, that sparked a treasure hunt by including concealed clues to the location of a jewelled golden hare that had been created and hidden somewhere in Britain by Williams. The book became the inspiration for a genre of books known today as armchair treasure hunts.
Culture of fear is the concept that people may incite fear in the general public to achieve political or workplace goals through emotional bias. It was developed as a sociological framework by Frank Furedi and has been more recently popularized by the American sociologist Barry Glassner.
Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72 is a 1973 book that recounts and analyzes the 1972 presidential campaign in which Richard Nixon was re-elected President of the United States. Written by Hunter S. Thompson and illustrated by Ralph Steadman, the book was largely derived from articles serialized in Rolling Stone throughout 1972.
Sexual grooming is the action or behavior used to establish an emotional connection with a minor under the age of consent, and sometimes the child's family, to lower the child's inhibitions with the objective of sexual abuse. It can occur in various settings, including online, in person, and through other means of communication. Children who are groomed may experience mental health issues, including "anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress, and suicidal thoughts."
The Great Shark Hunt is a book by Hunter S. Thompson. Originally published in 1979 as Gonzo Papers, Vol. 1: The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time, the book is a roughly 600-page collection of Thompson's essays from 1956 to the end of the 1970s, including the rise of the author's own gonzo journalism style as he moved from Air Force and sports beat writing to straight-ahead political commentary. It is the first of what would become four volumes in The Gonzo Papers series.
Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children (CSEC) defines the "umbrella" of crimes and activities that involve inflicting sexual abuse on to a child as a financial or personal opportunity. Commercial Sexual Exploitation consists of forcing a child into prostitution, sex trafficking, early marriage, child sex tourism and any other venture of exploiting children into sexual activities. According to the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, the lack of reporting the crime and "the difficulties associated with identifying and measuring victims and perpetrators" has made it almost impossible to create a national estimate of the prevalence of Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children in the United States. There is an estimated one million children that are exploited for commercial sex globally; of the one million children that are exploited, the majority are girls.
Callan is a British action-drama spy television series created by James Mitchell, first airing between 1967 and 1972. It starred Edward Woodward as David Callan, an agent of a state secret service dealing with internal security threats to the United Kingdom. Though portrayed as having responsibilities similar to those of the real-life MI5, Callan's fictional "Section" has carte blanche to use the most ruthless of methods. In the storylines interrogation is by means of torture, while extrajudicial killings are so routine they have a colour-coded filing system. Despite being an assassin who stays in the socially isolating job because it is the only thing he is good at, Callan is a sympathetic character by comparison to his sadistic upper-class colleagues and implacable superiors. The downbeat cover for the Section's headquarters was the scrap metal business of "Charlie Hunter". Produced by ABC Weekend TV and Thames Television, the programme proved extremely popular; as well as four series between 1967 and 1972 there was a feature-length film in 1974 and a TV film in 1981.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream is a 1971 novel in the gonzo journalism style by Hunter S. Thompson. The book is a roman à clef, rooted in autobiographical incidents. The story follows its protagonist, Raoul Duke, and his attorney, Doctor Gonzo, as they descend on Las Vegas to chase the American Dream through a drug-induced haze, all the while ruminating on the failure of the 1960s countercultural movement. The work is Thompson's most famous book and is noted for its lurid descriptions of illicit drug use and its early retrospective on the culture of the 1960s. Thompson's highly subjective blend of fact and fiction, which it popularized, became known as gonzo journalism. Illustrated by Ralph Steadman, the novel first appeared as a two-part series in Rolling Stone magazine in 1971 before being published in book form in 1972. It was later adapted into a film of the same title in 1998 by director Terry Gilliam, starring Johnny Depp and Benicio del Toro, who portrayed Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo, respectively.
Crime has been recorded in the United States since its founding and has fluctuated significantly over time. Most available data underestimate crime before the 1930s, giving the false impression that crime was low in the early 1900s and had a sharp rise after. Instead, violent crime during the colonial period was likely three times higher than the highest modern rates in the data we have, and crime had been on the decline since colonial times. Within the better data for crime reporting and recording available starting in the 1930s, crime reached its broad, bulging modern peak between the 1970s and early 1990s. After 1992, crime rates have generally trended downwards each year, with the exceptions of a slight increase in property crimes in 2001 and increases in violent crimes in 2005–2006, 2014–2016 and 2020–2021. As of July 1, 2024 violent crime was down and homicides were on pace to drop to 2015 levels by the end of the year.
Bibliography of works by American author and journalist Hunter S. Thompson.
In Eastern Orthodox Christian tradition the Myrrhbearers are the individuals mentioned in the New Testament who were directly involved in the burial or who discovered the empty tomb following the resurrection of Jesus. The term traditionally refers to the women who came with myrrh to the tomb of Christ early in the morning to find it empty. Also included are Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, who took the body of Jesus down from the cross, anointed it with myrrh and aloes, wrapped it in clean linen, and placed it in a new tomb. In Western Christianity, the women at the tomb, the Three Marys or other variants are the terms normally used.
Angela Calomiris was an American photographer who became a secret FBI informant within the American Communist Party (CPUSA) under the name Angela Cole. Calomiris spent seven years undercover in the party from February 1942 until April 26, 1949, when she was called to testify in the trial of eleven CPUSA leaders, who were convicted of conspiracy to advocate the overthrow of the US government on October 13, 1949.
Hunters is an American conspiracy drama television series created by David Weil. It premiered on February 21, 2020, on Amazon Prime Video. In August 2020, the series was renewed for a second and final season which premiered on January 13, 2023.