Hell's Angels: Hunter S. Thompson (Penguin Modern Classics)

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I had my old lady with me--we're separated now, but then we were doin okay and she wouldn't have none of me hustlin anything else while she was around.

Huge bikes, filthy denim and an aura of barely contained violence; the Hell's Angels could paralyse whole towns with fear. The idea, after all, is to reach the destination--not to lock horns with hayseed cops along the way.I’ve been a newspaperman for 40 years, the last 25 at The New York Times, and crime is the meat and potatoes of the business.

Thompson manages to give astonishing insight into a legendary biker gang, while also de-mystifying their romantic outlaw-aura and unveiling a gritty truth of violent criminals who understand themselves as not only above but beyond the law. On another Saturday he might have slept until two or three in the afternoon, then gone out again, with a dozen or so of the brethren, to find the Diablos and whip them down to jelly.an old neighborhood with small, once-white frame houses sitting close to each other on tiny lots and sparse front lawns worn down by generations of newsboys delivering the Oakland Tribune. Any dissenters in the ranks are handled quietly at the regular Friday-night meetings, or they simply fade out of the picture and change their life pattern so as never again to cross paths with any group of Angels. This obsession with the authentic - or at least a cynical pandering to the readers demand for it - surfaces most vividly in Allen's introductions to his books, and on some of the cover blurbs. Hell's Angels is the hair-raising result: a free-wheeling, impressionistic counter-culture classic that made Hunter S. The latest literary effort from Hell's Angels chieftain Barger is "a collection of true stories, modern myths, and biker tales" submitted to him by other bikers.

In the mid-1960s, Thompson spent almost two years living with the controversial An-gels, cycling up and down the coast, reveling in the anarchic spirit of their clan, and, as befits their name, raising hell. Thompson, throughout his life, proved not to be the world’s most reliable narrator, but he seems to have taken notes when writing this book to include documenting what drugs he used. The run was on, "outlaws" from all over the state rolled in packs toward Monterey: north from San Bernardino and Los Angeles on 101; south from Sacramento on 50 . The books I’m recommending have all been key sources of insight in differing ways into the realities of the club worlds and cultures. As a journalist and author of history books who's lived in Texas for most of my adult life, I've found myself unavoidably steeped in Texas Ranger lore.It is at this moment that the norms of the teenage peer group come to replace those of class society. Whatever you think about outlaw biker clubs, there’s no denying it’s a serious lifestyle choice involving real commitment and having serious consequences, but it wasn’t a subject being addressed with serious fiction. Although more often than not they reinforce sexual and racial stereotypes, they do, at points, break them down. Thompson’s “strange and terrible saga” of life on the road with motorcycle outlaw gang Hell’s Angels. The Hell's Angels are 'the first wave of a future that nothing in our history has prepared us to cope with'.