Poet, shaman, Dionysian drunk, and druggie, Doors lead singer Jim Morrison quickly achieved cult status after his death in 1971. In The Lizard King, Jerry Hopkins reassesses Jim Morrison's life and provides fresh insights into this powerful and troubled talent, considering him as a human being rather than the myth he has become. At the heart of the book is a series of interviews with Morrison by journalists Ben Fong-Torres, John Tobler, Richard Goldstein, and others. Published uncut, they present a previously unseen Morrison: articulate, intelligent, witty, even self-deprecating...

Here is Jim Morrison in all his complexity: singer, philosopher, poet, delinquentthe brilliant, charis-matic, and obsessed seeker who rejected authority in any form, the explorer who probed the bounds of reality to see what would happen. Meticulously researched, this definitive biography tells the story of a genius who shot like a rocket across the musical horizon, then fell in burning fragments as his life spiraled out of control....

In the colorful tradition of Hemingway’s A Movable Feast, Jerry Hopkins recalls his first decade as a Bangkok expatriate by profiling 25 of the city’s most unforgettable characters. Among them are the man thought to be the model for Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, an advertising executive who photographs Thai bargirls for Playboy, an Oscar-winning screenwriter who moved there to die, a Catholic priest who has lived and worked in the Bangkok slums for 35 years, a circus dwarf turned computer programmer turned restaurateur, three Vietnam war helicopter pilots who
opened a go-go bar, a pianist at one of the world’s best hotels who ended up on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted list, a detective who tracks runaways who fake their deaths and a documentary filmmaker who lives with elephants. All of them "escaped" to Thailand to reinvent themselves and live out their fantasies in one of the world’s most notorious cities....