Here's something to do: read with the TV on. This is what happened when I did this very thing on Thanksgiving morning. I turned on the TV, made a pot of coffee, chewed granola bars and read "GONZO", the recent oral biography of Hunter S. Thompson while glancing at the parades broadcast via local TV stations. Two versions of the American Dream: contrasting, combative and confusing. In the midst of floats transporting ice skating carebears and grinning, waving celebs, I envisioned a Gonzo parade, vast balloons based on Ralph Steadman illustrations, inflated with nitrous oxide. Volunteers tethered to the giant inflatable caricatures wear vintage Nixon masks and point obscene gestures to the crowds lining the streets. Well behaved Good Charlotte performs on an oil company float as if all the new punks defy alternative fuels. Cut to high school marching bands playing 50s era musical comedy numbers while inane commentary spews forth from weatherproofed booths with cue card reading robots who wouldn't recognize irony if it were photographed by paparazzi and spread across the tabloids with phosphorescent typography on glow-in-the-dark cardstock. The story of HST is a sad one, ultimately. He was ensnared in his own persona. It was not pretty, the exact opposite of ice skating carebears sharing corporate sponsored floats with fresh-faced popsingers lipsynching and vying for the world's attention with choreographed plushies. GONZO catalogs the decline in excruciating detail. It ends with several writers assessing Thompson's place in literary history. Norman Mailer: "He's one of those people who you could read a page of his work and be turned on by it, and you can't say that about too many writers." Tom Wolfe: "Instead of saying, 'Let's put this thing up against the wall,' Hunter would say, 'Let's just go through the wall.'"