Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga by Hunter S. Thompson Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga
Book Review: Hell's Angels
Summary: 5 Stars
started out good, then turned in to a whiny account of author complaing about not being treated right by the Angels.Book Review: Hell's Angels More Than A Curiosity
Summary: 5 Stars
Just finished reading this book and couldn't put it down. If you have a curiosity about the Hell's Angels, this is the book to buy! Hunter S. Thompson rode with the Angels during a promonient time in their history with all the colorful characters that have made a name in Angel's history like Sonny Barger, Terry the Tramp, Mouldy Marvin, Magoo, Mother's Miles and many more. Hunter writes about the infamous Bass Lake Run, the Monterey Rape Incident, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters' parties for the Hell's Angels and the Viet Nam Day Committee confrontation with the Hell's Angels in Berekley. He also takes the opportunity to inject his take on the biased press-media of the time and pretty much tells the stories as they happened that will keep any reader riveted and titallated. Buy this book if you want an adventure with the most infamous motorcycle gang on the scene today and then.Book Review: Hells Angels
Summary: 5 Stars
I really should like Hunter Thompson more than I do, I mean he did ride a BSA and he is from my hometown of Louisville, Ky but to be honest he's always seemed kind of faggy to me with that gay filtered cigarette thing hanging from his mouth, plus there's that whole bizarre chapter he dedicated to finding a link between outlaw bikers and homosexuality. Hey what can I say, the guy sets my gaydar off. But I will give him credit, he did write a true classic in Hell's Angels. I've heard grumblings that he sacrificed reality for entertainment value by making some of the HA's into exagerated caricatures of themselves in this book, but whether thats true or not this is a great read.Book Review: Highly readable snapshot of a '60s cultural phenonmenon
Summary: 4 Stars
This was the book that first brought Hunter S. Thompson to national attention, and deservedly so. He dissects the cultural phenomenon that was the Hell's Angels in the mid-1960s with great insight and a prose style that reads like a cold beer on a hot day -- impossible to put down.
Thompson stressed two major themes in his assessment on the Angels: (1) They were largely a bunch of "losers," men with very limited opportunities to achieve The American Dream, who banded together to create The American Nightmare of violent anarchy, or at least the image of violent anarchy. In Thompson's portrayal, the Angels seem to revel in their "outsider" status and in their calculated efforts to shake up the "squares." Thompson also indicates that the image of Hell's Angels in the '60s seems to have mattered far more than the relatively isolated incidents of violence and public outrage they perpetrated. (2) That image was swallowed whole by the mainstream media of the mid-'60s (and by law enforcement officials), so that square Americans already reeling from the civil rights movement and black unrest, from the sexual revolution of the '60s, and from the "counterculture" and antiwar movements, were presented with one more reason to believe that the country was going to hell. Thomson sees the hysteria over the Angels in that era as essentially a creation of gullible reporters and paranoid politicians and cops.
This book (which came out in 1966) catches the California-based Angels between 1964 and 1966, as the hysteria was spreading. Eventually the Angels began to believe the media image too, which led to that fatal night at Altamont Raceway in 1969. Thompson may bear some of that responsibility, too, simply because his book was The Word on the Angels in that time; but his accurate assessment of the Angels was overwhelmed by the popular image that "outlaw bikers," Hollywood, and the media as a whole found profitable to promote.
Some reviewers portray "Hell's Angels" as the story of Thompson's own involvement with the motorcycle group. Certainly, Thompson is a "character" in the book, but he's careful to keep some distance from the Angels. (In the first-person centerpiece of the book, an Angels "run" to Bass Lake, California in 1965, Thompson traveled by automobile rather than on a "chopper.") Moreover, he never forgets that the story he's trying to tell is of the motorcycle club and their image, not about himself. His detached involvement (involved detachment?) in this book is a model for all insistently subjective journalists. I have read little of Thompson's later work, and I gather that as he became more concerned about hyping his own image, he worked up some calculated outrages of his own; but "Hell's Angels" remains a damned good piece of "new" reporting.
Since the 1960s, Hell's Angels -- portrayed by some romantic pukes in Thompson's time as latter-day cowboys, the last champions of traditional American "freedom" -- has gone corporate, handing out franchises ("charters") around the world and selling logoed merchandise. The most famous of the Angels, Ralph "Sonny" Barger, has parlayed his status as Oakland chapter president into a franchise of his own (complete with website), marketing his own "lean and mean" brand of beer, writing a philosophical self-help book and selling signed copies at motorcycle shows. Certain outlaw motorcyclists still are being blamed (with some justification, apparently) for a variety of crimes in various countries. Thompson's book has little to do with the commercialized Hell's Angels or felonious "1 percenters" of today. It's a book very much of its time and place -- but such a well-focused, incisive snapshot it is!
Book Review: Hog Wild
Summary: 5 Stars
Roll up your sleeves boys and girls, if you read Hell's Angels the Doctor is going to inject you with a dosage of Outlaw Reality and Hog Rage as it were. The Hell's Angels are the last vestiges of the American Outlaw, 1%'s they're called, outside the outside, committed to a life of Freedom, punctuated by violence, booze, barbituates, indiscriminate sex and of course cruising the Amercian Wastelands on their Great Metallic Steeds, stripped down Harley Davidson's known affectionately as Hogs. Hunter S. is in his own right a one percenter. This book shows the Dr. of Gonzo's journalistic zeal, as he braves the world of the Angels, driving not a Hog as he should but a Dark Shadow. This is only too perfect as Hunter is the dark specter following the dastardly deeds of these bastard bikers. This book displays Hunter's ballsy journalism, as well as allowing him to focus on a central theme that would go on to pervade his other works: the outlaw and his importance to American society, a society that is dredged to the hilt with phonies, gutless wonders, souless greedmongers, hypocrites, cowards, politicians and other scum, capitalisitc, bureacratic, pig-like and otherwise. Hell's Angels is the journalistic calm that precedes the storm of hallucinagenic brilliance that was Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. So one way or the other let the Doctor of Gonzo vaccinate your mind from the mindless surge that makes up the money grubbing, TV watching majority of this Great Country of Ours. (...)