Hunter was a voice for many generations like in his eloquent statement in "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" "...You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning...And that, I think, was the handle-that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail." And in 1994 when his arch-enemy Richard Milhous Nixon died, Hunter wrote an obituary for Rolling Stone Magazine, "Read it and weep, for we have lost our Satan. Richard Nixon has gone home to hell." Or about George Bush during the 2004 elections, "If Bush wins, the planet is doomed. The Halliburton Corporation will rule with an army of obedient geeks who will transform America into a land fit for religious freaks, informers, fascist legislators..." Or collectively, "...Nixon was genetically dishonest and so is Bush." But just when we thought that voice had been silenced and there were no more tales to tell another generation, Steadman saves the day with exceptional Gonzo prose and stories about excessive booze and drug binges, life, politics, the law...And a damn good dose of humour! For fans of the Doctor "The Joke's Over" is an essential read, especially if you followed Hunter's collected correspondence in his books "The proud Highway" and "Fear and Loathing in America". Steadman gives the criticism, the observers perspective and it all begins to make sense and the complete view is revealed.

2005. The first monument, Woody Creek. First conceived in 1977 in a West Hollywood Funeral parlour which Hunter asked Ralph to design. Joe Petro, Anna and Ralph Steadman seated beneath the realized monument, funded by Johnny Depp and activated to send Hunter's ashes into the firmament on 20 August 2006

This 30 year love and hate marriage of ideas between the two was the perfect cocktail mix of Gonzo, from the events they covered and slated together, nothing was safe or too sacred. But beyond the drug in- duced antics and the two finger salute to the laws and walls that bind us, that they barked out against, like any creative relation- ship there is always a clash and a lull. After reading "The Joke's Over" one gets the impression from Steadman, that Hunter was a mean old bastard, but with a heart that beat against injustice, and a man with a crazy mind but with the cogs functioning perfectly. As Steadman says in his book, "All his heroes like Joseph Conrad, Ernest Hemming- way and William Faulkner wrote proper stories and then there was Hunter, this magnificent outlaw, with jang-

ling silver spurs on pair of Low basketball sneakers, whose prose style was peerless, but whose ability to write a novel eluded him to the end. He was his own best story. But I haven't finished with him just yet. I need to mock him and beat on him like a lost cockerel, just like he mocked me."

The postman could rest his eyes because that day in 2005, there would be no words leaving Woody Creek. Hunter was doing his own send-off in his own style, in a cannon designed by Steadman to shoot his ashes, scattering them like confetti under an open free space of a deep blue sky. A fitting end to a man who lived his life high above the world.

Reviewed by Mark A. Silberstein