So, maybe Hunter S. Thompson was right…perhaps Ralph shouldn’t write. I expected quite a bit from The Joke’s Over, Ralph Steadman’s account of 30+ years of working with the late Thompson. But I didn’t really get a sense of what kind of relationship they had. Nor did I get a sense of the kind of guy Thompson was. It was pretty bland overall. However, wedged halfway through the book, Steadman was able to spit out the best assessment of Thompson’s writing abilities ever. Witness: “All [Hunter’s] heroes like Joseph Conrad, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner wrote paper stories and then there was Hunter, this magnificent outlaw, with jangling spurs on a pair of Converse 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.”That pretty much sums it up. Too bad the rest of the book couldn’t follow suit.