Really? Inflation equals antiquity? The SF we live in now is a suburban paradise in comparison to forty years ago. Thompson doesn't get into the organized crime part of the story because they didn't let him, and it is very scary. It's a book that gentrifies a horrible subject. Hello, desensitized.

In response to “James’s Review” 4/5 stars April 2008

You make some really valid points about parts of it being embarrassingly quaint when reading with hindsight but then again, isn’t that the way hindsight usually operates? I don’t think that HST’s intent was to have a future “significance” in the way that you’re implying because it’s not the intent of journalism (even Gonzo). The intent of journalism, real to-the-letter journalism, is to report and in most cases report what is current. At the time of publication the Hells Angels were a home grown menace that was both real and imagined (and they owe not a little of that infamy to the media as HST aptly points out). They have since evolved from their simple nomad rabble rouser days to being mischievous enough to earn the ire of the F.B.I. along with the rest of the “Big Four” outlaw gangs. In the “Quebec Biker War” between the Angels and the “Rock Machine”, over 150 people were killed which is on par with the biggest Cosa Nostra conflicts in the U.S.A. So while average citizens don’t generally walk in fear of the Hells Angels it is a stretch to consider biker gangs to be an insignificant thing of the past.

For my part I thought that it was very interesting and surprisingly fair considering that the author was in effect part of the Angels camp by association. Drawing from first hand experience from “runs” that he participated in and primary source interviews, HST pulls no punches in calling it as he sees it. Often he points out the illogical doctrines of gang mentality and inherent irony at their loss individuality in the attempt to distance themselves from society at large and their law abiding motorcycle counterparts without the evangelical fire of an outsider looking in.

It is precisely because the book is not “nearly as Gonzo” as some of his seminal works that Thompson makes a credible account. He doesn’t overly vilify the Angels nor does he belittle their loyalty to one another and the jocular perspective on what they consider to be a misfit lifestyle. His commentary carries perspective because he is accomplice by mild participation but he never quite loses the stigma of “the establishment” by the Angels own admission. This is punctuated at the close by the stomping he takes from the hands and boots of some of the Angels. Despite that he chooses not to close with malice but with words of affection for some of the Angels he grew to know as people beyond the colors.

Thompson’s account was researched, thorough and insightful. He never offers a conclusion or even a reason why—only a what. For that he offers the reader a ride with the perhaps the most infamous of the world’s outlaw motorcycle gangs.

“There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. The others-the living-are those who pushed their control as far as they felt they could handle it, and then pulled back, or slowed down, or did whatever they had to when it came to choose between Now and Later. But the edge is still out there. Or maybe it’s in. The association of motorcycles with LSD is no accident of publicity. They are both a means to an end, to the place of definitions.”

-Hunter S. Thompson: Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga of The Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs-

" The subtitle is “A Strange and Terrible Saga.” Reading it now, it just doesn’t seem very strange and terrible at all. And not much of a saga either. " Very well said. I had the same lackluster reaction.