Truth be told, Locke seems more like a social critic or humanist at heart than a marketing consultant, and his essential disdain for corporations (which are anti-human, he declares, despite all their philanthropic tootle) leaves the reader wondering whether he really wants e-commerce to effectively pervade the Web's truly democratic, populist microcommunities for its own purposes. As his wonderfully cranky cult Web zine, Entropy Gradient Reversals, and his alter ego therein, RageBoy, have proven, the man's a smart, witty, broadly read cyberpundit. In Gonzo Marketing, he tweaks everyone from Disney, Time Warner AOL, and IBM to fellow biz-book writers like Seth Godin (Permission Marketing), and if you read it first for its own eclectic, acerbic delights and second for a postboom e-marketing primer, you'll be rightly pleased.

Gonzo Marketing was also ranked #5 on Computers & Internet editor Brooke Gilbert's Amazon Editors' Choice 2001: Digital Business and Culture hit parade, sandwiched between some very fine books by Steven Johnson, Steven Levy, Linus Torvalds, Larry Lessig, and Michael Lewis. Collect the whole set!

There are a couple full-text chapters of Gonzo on the book site, if you want to check it out. Or click on the Gonzo Engaged grafik to go to a multi-way "partyblog" discussion, already in progress...