Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga (Modern Library) | Hunter S. Thompson

Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga (Modern Library) | Hunter S. Thompson | Hell's Angels

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Hell's Angels: A S...

	Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga (Modern Library) Hunter S. Thompson Modern Library, 1999 - 288 pages average customer review:based on 117 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

On the road with the Angels

I'm a great Hunter S Thompson fan, and have read all of his books. Although "Hell's Angels" was his first book, it would be the last one, that I got around to reading. I was used to his later, gonzo style, of writing so I was actually expecting this to be more of the same. But it was not. He seems more objective and a bit more conventional in this volume, than in his later work. He is still biased, but not to the same degree as he would become later. Also he keeps his long rantings about everything and nothing with no connection whatsoever to his main subjects to a minimum.

He is still very eloquent and writes in an interesting way, just more sober. A bit like Tom Wolfe or such.

I'm not particularly interested in the subject of Hell's Angels or bikers, but I enjoyed this look into a culture that seldom lets in outsiders. Also it gives some contrast to the image the Hell's Angels have these days. Very interesting and highly recommendable.

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Hell's Angels

started out good, then turned in to a whiny account of author complaing about not being treated right by the Angels.

A Classic Account of a Classic Period

As a ripe young 16 year old, discovering the post beatnik era that was blossoming into the hippie era, this account of life with the Angels was hypnotic, gripping, and even influencial on my impressionable mind. As boorish, surly, dangerous and unpredictable as they were the Angels Thompson portrays were perversely attractive to many 60's youth who wondered what kind of life they might want to persue if they, in fact, failed in straight society.

This is a classic account of the Angel's during their classic period when they came of age in the mind of the world. Thompson's chapter "The Making of the Menace" could more aptly be called today 'The Making of the Legend"

An absolute must read.

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This is my 3rd copy...

I just purchased my 3rd copy of this book...I've given two copies away.

Very intersting reading!!!

DOCTOR THOMPSON LEARNS HIS TRADE

As Thompson aficionados are probably aware Hell's Angels is Hunter's first real foray into the sustained writing that would make us smile or be provoked to call for his head on a platter for the next forty years. Although the text clearly demonstrates that this is not a piece of `gonzo' journalism, as it later came to be known, one can see the outline of where he could be heading in this book on probably the most famous outlaw motorcycle gang in American history. The line between Thompson the reporter and Thompson the participant is still fairly clear but one can see just enough sympathy with the subject matter of his book to see where he might be heading. His major `gonzo' work and most famous book Fear and Loathing in Los Vegas thus did not just come out of the blue.

And what of the subject matter of his book, the infamous Hell's Angels that in my youth my mother warned me against incessantly? As noted above Hunter gained a grudging sympathy for them during his yearlong experience in and around their hangouts and their nefarious various doings in Northern California. Some of the antics that they were involved in like their `robust' partying in natural settings and scaring the `squares' seem a little dated, and juvenile. Their gratuitous violence, however, seems rather too familiar.

The more sociological aspects of their marginal social existence is far more interesting and Thompson does a good job of identifying the post-World War II American times that gave rise to such self-defining outcasts. This phenomenon enters the books as one of the outcomes that occur when the Turner thesis on the effects of the end of the frontier and land's end get fleshed out in sunny California. While these men, and they were almost exclusively white Anglo-Saxon men (the women involved with them are a separate and in some ways more interesting question although in the book a marginal one), came from mainly working class backgrounds the details provided by Thompson portrays a classic lumpenproletarian milieu. Thus, politics, protest or allegiance to other organizations meant nothing to them. Forget all that intellectual gibberish, it was about the bikes, man. Dr. Freud can read what he wants into that. Dr. Thompson gives it to us straight.

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