| |
Shop
| |  |
|
Best Sellers | | Home Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga (Modern Library) | |
|  | |  | | | Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga (Modern Library) | | | | | | | |
List Price:
| $21.95 | |
Our Price:
| $14.93 | |
You Save:
| $7.02 (32%)
| | Shipping: | Eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. | |
*Shipping:
| |
| | | SKU:
| | In Stock | | Availability:
Usually ships in 1 business days | | |
|
| | Features | ISBN13: 9780679603313Condition: NewNotes: BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed
| |
| | Description | The author's harrowing and critically acclaimed first book chronicles his year riding with the Hell's Angels and other motorcycle gangs, an "experiment" that ended when he was beaten nearly to death by a group of Angels. 20,000 first printing. NYT. | |
| | Product Details | | Author: | Hunter S. Thompson | | Hardcover: | 288 pages | | Publisher: | Modern Library | | Publication Date: | December 07, 1999 | | Language: | English | | ISBN: | 067960331X | | Package Length: | 8.1 inches | | Package Width: | 5.4 inches | | Package Height: | 1.1 inches | | Package Weight: | 0.8 pounds | | Average Customer Rating: |  based on 138 reviews |
| |
| | Customer Reviews | Average Customer Review:
Write an online review and share your thoughts with other customers.
 The most talked about book among the boys at my high school Aug 17, 2010
When I was in my early years of high school, this book was a mini-rage among the boys. It started among the "tough guys" and spread horizontally and vertically until nearly every male had at least heard of it and the more scintillating contents. My brother brought a borrowed copy home and spoke very highly of it. However, what finally led me to read it was hearing the other boys talk about it on the school bus. I was a listener and observer and enjoyed hearing the stories, but what fascinated me were the reactions of some of the girls that also heard the stories. They were appalled at the tales of "motorcycle mamas", the women that were nothing more than sex toys for the male bikers. One oft-repeated tale heard on the bus is the one on page 248 where a Thompson describes a woman being penetrated in several ways no less than fifty times.
While the tales in this book did not overwhelm me, some of the boys were. The stories of men that were free of the travails of civilization, taking what they needed, living on the road and sharing drugs and women fascinated some of the more rootless of my classmates. I know of one that left on a nationwide motorcycle trip right after graduating from high school and a few others that joined the local outlaw motorcycle gang. To them, being devoid of responsibility for anything other than feeding the hog between their legs was the ultimate in freedom. It also gave them a sense of belonging that they could not find elsewhere.
Of course, while Thompson's tale is real, for most of the boys that read the book, it was an expression of fantasy, a way of dropping out at a time when it was a phrase passed around quite freely. The men and women bikers depicted in this book were extremely tough, honorable in their own way but still ruthless in their lives. It is not a television fantasy, yet many of the readers I knew treated it as such.
 "...like a burst of dirty thunder..." Aug 05, 2010
I'd read this book a long time ago, and when I saw it at a garage sale for a dime I decided to try it again. It's HST's first book and a pretty good one, too. Later on his ego got completely out of control and he began writing about himself as a colorful hero instead of the story he was ostensibly covering. I never found him as endlessly fascinating as he thought himself to be during his Gonzo Journalism career. Just a drug addict on an expense account, not a skilled writer. He deserves quite a bit of credit for operating such an excellent con that it resulted in a lifelong ideal set-up for himself, but it didn't make for good reading, IMHO. But this book came before all that and it is absorbing, to give the Devil his due.
What's intriguing now is his description of the Hell's Angels as misfits banding together who worked straight jobs and/or collected unemployment benefits to subsidize their outlaw lifestyle; and that there was no high-level crime involved. According to HST, the Angels at that time were strictly consumers of drugs, not distributors or manufacturers. He also witnessed or reported on lots of stray violence, but heard not even a hint of any premeditated murders or intimidation or extortion, or any such goings-on. There were specious media reports and rumors of drug-smuggling by the Angels, but HST dismisses these tales out-of-hand. He makes the point that people as conspicuous as outlaw bikers would make poor smugglers, since this is a field where anonymity is necessary for success. He was absolutely certain that the Angels would wear their colors and ride their bikes in full view while engaging in any criminal endeavors. HST seems to have had both admiration and contempt for the Angels and maybe his disdain for them led him to overlook their possible secret activities, unwilling to credit them with the necessary smarts that would be required. Or perhaps events in this book actually took place before the outlaw bike clubs became enmeshed in organized crime.
An odd parallel occurs in William Queen's book "Under and Alone" about a BATF Agent infiltrating the Mongols roughly thirty years after the events in "Hell's Angels". Mr. Queen describes most of the Mongols that he encountered as unsure of how to exploit their situation for financial gain and perfectly content to just enjoy "The Life". He looked very intently indeed at all aspects of the Mongols' activities that he possibly could; but his investigation mostly uncovered bike thefts and parole violations and illegal possession and sales of guns. There was drug usage, but no sales or manufacturing. He did witness the Mongols' San Diego chapter intimidating and extorting from a strip-club owner, but it's unclear if this resulted in any criminal charges. This isn't intended to disparage Mr. Queen's extremely dangerous and astonishingly skillful undercover mission in any way, shape or form. Some of the Mongols were also implicated in rapes, robberies, assaults and drug offenses during his experiences with them and his own life was very much at risk the entire time. But these similarities to HST's account are really noteworthy, also IMHO.
Maybe the particular chapters of either club that both men were reporting on were relatively uninvolved in big-time organized crime, after all. Or maybe not all outlaw bikers are actually up to their necks in drugs and murder and prostitution and so on. Maybe there are degrees of culpability here. That's not to say that they're all just a bunch of nice guys who happen to like Harleys. They're terribly violence-prone and volatile, to put it mildly. It's always wise to treat with them with respect, but keep your distance. Outsiders can become targets at any time and without warning. Especially when the members get intoxicated.
But I digress. "Hell's Angels" is a good book and a good read, a well-written account of a segment of the Sixties that's pretty interesting in its own right.
Dated, But a Superior Book Aug 04, 2010
I found this book at a bargain price at a used bookshop, and spent the afternoon reading it. I have always enjoyed Thompson's writing, but somehow, always managed to miss this one. I am sorry I did.
Thompson's book is, essentially, a three pronged look at American society in the mid-1960's. On the one hand, you have the Hell's Angels, the consumate "bad boys" of the mid- to late 20th century American imagination. On the other, a greedy and sensationalistic press anxious for the headlines - real or fabricated - the Angels once provoked. And finally, you have "John Q. Public," the man caught in between the Harley riding outlaws and their media myth, far too prone to accept anything negative as universally true based on nothing but what was often nothing more than flimsy rumor and wild speculation. And you see the beginning transformation of the Angels themselves under the barrage of press coverage they sometimes loathed and sometimes embraced as they went "mainstream," for good or for ill. Academically, it's a masterful demonstration of how the emerging media culture of the 1950's and 1960's began to demonstrate a real power in shaping public perception and what that did to at least one "imagined community" which quickly lost or was compelled to transform its own sense of its history and itself, and how a country in small began to rehape its own definitions of "good" and "evil" whetted by an escalating appetite for voyeurism. It is a great slice of period history read broadly.
Thompson has been roundly criticized for making the Angels exemplars of what John Keegan might have called "The False Heroic" and then roundly criticized for stabbing his subjects in the back, in spite of the on-again/off-again grudging and tepid "approval" of people like legendary Angel Sonny Barger. I have to say I did not see any of that. Thompson was struggling to find fact behind the Angel's often self-promoted legendarium, and he succeeded in as much as an "outsider looking in" can. While he amply demonstrates how the social prejudices and slavering media of the 1960's created a "boogeyman" that was really more a creature of shadow, I did not see the Angels getting any "free passes" for their "groupthink" codes or sometimes incredibly bad conduct, even if their mayhem was, statistically, not even a "blip on the radar screen." So what the reader gets is, essentially, a really wonderful deconstruction of several social myths on multiple levels. The dryness of Thompson's prose and the marked disinclination to pass judgments without serious and explained reflection, sourcing and thought is, plainly, a deliberate choice made to avoid the lurid, red-toned language of the popular press and the Angels' own myths circulating in his own time. So, while it is true you do get a book that can seem rather "Plain Jane," in context, it was a brave choice Thompson made if he was going to write something worthwhile. And I suspect that complaints about it being "boring" are really more reflections of the fact that people, hungry for the bloody and violent, had elevated expectations going in and were unprepared for a sober, non-sensationalized account of "Hell's Angels on the Cusp." Thompson had little use for the dark romantic narrative from anywhere or anyone, and this "sick and tired" deadpan attitude served his writing and credibility well even if it won him few admirers anywhere.
Thompson's own self-promotion is really only a small part of this book, and I suspect much of that came later, one of the things making Thompson such a paradox, hypocrite, or court jester, depending on your point of view. Suffice it to say that whether or not his "beating" by Hell's Angels was real, just a tiff gone haywire, or even staged remains debated, apparently. But most of the book is free of that, as I mentioned, and I don't think it had any real impact on the whole.
This is an example of investigative journalism "done right." I learned a very great deal about how what we like to believe and what is actually so can be very uncomfortable when exposed to light of day since, for whatever the many reasons Thompson explains simply and well, the Angels touched a unique chord in the American cultural awareness. And this book also interested me enough to think about a follow-up read updating this fascinating story. It's Americana I never really considered before, and that's always a great discovery.
A worthy book, journalism and cultural history blended and blended well and thoughtfully. Recommended.
Pretty good book, but... Aug 04, 2010
Hell's Angels is an in depth look into the lives of the motorcycle gang, delivered by Mr. Gonzo Journalism himself. Seems like a formula for success, right?
The problem is, nothing really happens. There's a lot of build up to the 4 or 5 exciting parts, but mostly these guys seem to just sit in bars and posture.
I love Hunter S. Thompson, but unless you're already a die hard fan, you might want to start with either Fear and Loathing or Rum Diary before you tackle this one.
0 of 1 found the following review helpful:
Quick delivery, good service Jul 22, 2010
The book arrived promptly and in the condition it was promised to be in. Very nice.
| |
| |
| |  | |  |
|
| You may also like ... |
