Drinking with the bikies21 April 2012 I had been meaning to read this book for quite a while; ever since a friend of mine mentioned it to me years ago. Penguin then decided to release a number of books in a new mass market format, similar to their original releases back in the early days of the company. The books that they released in this new format were inexpensive and were collected from various authors throughout history. I actually appreciated this because they selected a lot of lesser know...

The book that cemented Thompson’s reputation as the premier journalist of the crazed, and deservedly so. Thompson rode and hung with the Angels for a couple of years, and he presents them, at the height of their notoriety, through his own cynical, paranoiac freak prism. So we see the Angels as bearded, drooling, vicious outlaws ready to rape or stomp anything and anyone who crosses their path, but we also see them as tired old goons, knowing full well that they’re losers, and just trying to hang...

Hunter S. Thompson is the writer you want to read if you want to pull all those cool guys. They all love him, it seems, so just make a trip to some hipster café, open one if his books and wait to score.I didn’t go for the obvious “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” but instead I read his debut, a non-fiction account of his time spent the Hell’s Angels, a motorcycle gang. It was also the book my book club was reading, so I didn’t have that much of a choice. Even growing up in the 80s and 90s in Pola...

Far from being freaks, the Hell's Angels are a logical product of the culture that now claims to be shocked at their existence...for twenty years they have sat with their children and watched yesterday's outlaws raise hell with yesterday's world...and now they are bringing up children who think Jesse James is a television character. This is the generation that went to war for Mom, God and Apple Butter, the American Way of Life. When they came back, they crowned Eisenhower and then retired to the...

You ever read a book where you can tell it was a magazine article padded out to book length? Here's one. Repetitive, circular and mostly boring, this is in no way worth reading.I had a little fun with Thompson's light jabs at Kesey - and having just read The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, I found the part where the two stories overlap very interesting - and he's sortof got a theme in there about society at the edge of society and masculinity and whatever (like all motorcycle riders, Thompson had s...

I felt this was just too long. I don't want to read a 300 page magazine article that doesn't have a cohesive story.

Hunter S. Thompson’s first book, Hell’s Angels is not nearly as “gonzo” or as good as his later writings and not nearly as fresh and fascinating as, say, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Hell’s Angels is a far more straightforward piece of journalism than HST’s later work but it is still an interesting read some 45 years on (certainly no small feat).For one, it is cursorily interesting in how Hell’s Angels has quickly become outdated with references like, “Hell, eight dollars was a case of beer and

I just read this for perhaps the fifth time. From this book up to about 1978 Hunter was at his peak and every book he wrote in that period is writing of the highest order. The guy was a major American prose stylist. Those of you who may scoff at this assertion will one day realize that I'm right. Hunter doesn't get nearly enough credit for being the very intelligent guy he was, and that intelligence is very visible in this book, written before the character of Hunter Thompson was developed enoug...

Almost gave this 5 stars but HST padded the final 100 pages with about 50 unnecessary pages full of statistics, fantasies, and a ridiculous chapter on a riot in a Sierra national park that never occurs .The rest of the book is just about perfect.You can see in this, his first book that Hunter S. Thompson emerged on the publishing scene a true flame breathing dragon of a journalist.Highest Recommendation.

I'd just read Jay Dobyn's extremely exciting and fully-involved No Angel: My Harrowing Undercover Journey to the Inner Circle of the Hells Angels. Dobyn was an undercover cop whose total immersion in Angels' culture led to him substituting his real life for what was really a job. Because it was so involved, it took me a while to get into Hunter Thompson's cool, cynical, totally-detached own year-long involvement with the Angels, whose beer, drugs and addiction to speed he was happy to share, but...

"By the middle of summer 1965 I had become so involved in the outlaw scene that I was no longer sure whether I was doing research on the Hell's Angels or being slowly absorbed by them.", pg. 46This strange and terrible saga tells the tale of the Hell's Angels Motorcycle Club. Thompson was able to ride, hang out, party, and observe the Angels in their natural habitat of Northern California in 1965, where Oakland Chapter President Sonny Barger ruled and called shots for all Angels, pg. 42. The boo...

A well rounded survey of the gang in their forrays, their ramblings, their symbols, their coverage, and their blunders too.Matching Soundtrack : Peasantry Or 'Light! Inside of Light!' - GSY!BE

***SPOILERS ALERT***Hell’s Angel’s is an account of the exaggerated myths, the terrible truths, the origins, motivations and the ethos of the motorcycle gang that terrorized American cities and small towns in the 1960s. A substantial portion of the book is dedicated to disproving the myths about the Angel’s which were created by the paranoid American media. Thompson investigates negative news reports about the Angels and shows how most of them were biased and hollow. But he also harbors no illus...

LOVED Even though it must be taken with a pinch of salt

Still the best book about bikers ever written - and completely unromanticized, too. Their lifestyle is shown in all its greasy and grimy glory. And Hunter took a bad stomping at the end of the book by some vicious Angels. Written over forty years ago and still rawer than a lot of shit out there!

Trigger Warning: violence, rape, etc.Hunter S. Thompson's Hell's Angels purports to be an inside look at the Hell's Angels motorcycle gang, but in the end it's little more than Thompson striking poses as an "insider" and issuing apologias for everything the Angels have done or are alleged to have done. For example, he frequently refers to them as rapists (and to their penchant for rape), but when it comes to specific incidents, he becomes a rape apologist, resorting to tactics ranging from the r...

This was the first hunter Thompson book I ever read and made me an instant fan of his work.Talk about a man who wanted to see the world from every angle. The scene I remember most was when he talked about the Angels getting hooked on acid. It was one thing they had in common with the hippies they hated, the difference being the angels didn’t necessarily take LSD because they loved its effects. While the merry pranksters were all about the hallucinations, the angels only took it because it was th...

Over 30 years ago I read excerpts of this book. In reading the whole piece now, I see that the work not only holds up over time but also that the full work is more impressive than the parts selected by national magazines. This portrait of the Hell’s Angels has all the info you would find in a dry academic sociological study but Thompson’s prose, personal experiences and reactions would never appear in an academic work, and these contribute greatly to the character of the work.Thompson has a curi...

Gentlemen, start your engines. An absolutely stunning debut for any writer.Thompson writes with knife-like precision and an eye for detail that pegs him as a born journalist but an ingenuity and original style that puts him in a league of his own. Sometimes he writes like a scientist, or like David Attenborough, describing a new rare species of gorillas that he has suddenly come upon in the jungle as in the following lines..."Probably the most universal common denominator in identification of He...

Both Hunter S. Thompson and the Hell's Angels bring preconceived notions to mind:Thompson was a crazy sonofabitch. He was a nutbag druggie who liked to blow things up.The Hell's Angel's are crazy motherfuckers. Remember Altamont? They killed like 500 people while providing concert security for the Rolling Stones.Both of these notions have some basis in reality. Thompson liked drugs and blowing things up. The Hell's Angels did provide security at Altamont, where one person was killed by an Angel