Arthur Graham’s Reviews > The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time > Status Update

My way of joking is to tell the truth. That's the funniest joke in the world. -- Muhammad Ali
Indeed. . . And that is also as fine a definition of "Gonzo Journalism" as anything I've ever heard, for good or ill.

The fireball Chicano lawyer was on his way to becoming a half-successful writer, a cult figure of sorts -- then a fugitive, a freak, and finally either a permanently missing person or an undiscovered corpse.
Oscar's fate is still a mystery, but every time his case seems to be finally closed, something happens to bring him back to life.

Both Carter and his wife have always been amazingly tolerant of my behavior, and on one or two occasions they have had to deal with me in a noticeably bent condition.

One of the constant nightmares of traveling with politicians is the need to keep them in sight at all times.

I like to eat breakfast alone, and almost never before noon; anybody with a terminally jangled lifestyle needs at least one psychic anchor every 24 hours, and mine is breakfast.

I took that fatal dive off the straight and narrow path so long ago that I can't remember when I first become a felon -- but I have been one ever since, and it's way too late to change now.

It is extremely difficult to concentrate on the cheap realities of Campaign '76 under these circumstances.

We are living in very strange times, and they are likely to get a lot stranger before we bottom out.

Looking back on all that, my only feeling for deep-sea fishing is one of absolute and visceral aversion. Hemingway had the right idea when he decided that a .45-caliber submachine gun was the proper tool for shark fishing, but he was wrong about his targets. Why shoot innocent fish, when the guilty walk free along the docks, renting boats for $140 a day to drunken dupes who call themselves "sport fishermen"?

The anglers assured me it was all a great thrill, but on the evidence, I couldn't believe it. The whole idea of fishing, it seemed to me, was to hook a thrashing sea monster of some kind and actually boat the bastard. And then eat it.