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

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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. He has worked on newspapers and magazines, becoming South American correspondent for the National Observer . This is the same format and pubication date as the first edition, in the original black cloth with red spine title and silver motorcyclist design on front cover with second printing on colophon page.

Coming - as he did - from Golder's Green, Tom should have recognised that the way to success was by diligent pursuit of the Almighty Quid. The fuzz crackdown on soccer crowds wearing skinhead uniforms had been the camel-breaking straw that started the rot. In 1980, twenty-five years after he began working with the Lucchese family, Hill was arrested for heroin trafficking.Although these books could never be taken to constitute a 'radical project', their progression is still depressing. If you were ambivalent about the Hell's Angels beforehand, this book's unlikely to change your view. It was a trip destined to make Hell's Angels household names across America, infamous for their violent, drunken rampages and feared for the destruction left in their wake.

However there are major differences between Allen's depiction of deviance and its control, and that of the Angel novelists. Now, on this holiday morning, his neighbors were out on front porches or at living-room windows, watching the awful show build up. Weird as it seems, as this gang of costumed hoodlums converged on Monterey that morning they were on the verge of "making it big," as the showbiz people say, and they would owe most of their success to a curious rape mania that rides on the shoulder of American journalism like some jeering, masturbating raven.What we have is a great piece of gonzo journalism and no doubt one of the best insights you're likely to find into the world of the outlaw motorcycle gang.