My review of "Hell's Angels", by Hunter S. Thompson

Hell's Angels by Hunter S. Thompson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Reading Hunter S. Thompson is like going jogging with a meth addict. He has these moments of brilliant prose, but zags and zigs and has a writing style that seems to skip important words or concepts or events in time, while still maintaining solid style. Spending a year with the Hell's Angels, you can almost see in his writing when he takes their viewpoint, is an advocate, attempts to analyze the news about them (the "Monterey rape") with a kind eye, but then as the book tracks his time with them through the drunken night at Bass Lake, the hopeful LSD parties at Ken Kesey's house in La Honda, with Ginsberg interrogating the cops on the road outside the house, the interactions with the black riders of the East Bay Dragons and the violent alignment with police at Berkeley Vietnam demonstrations, and finally in epilogue the "stomping" he took at the hands of Angels that you knew was coming all along, we can see Thompson's viewpoint pivot from advocate to critic. Surely some self-preservation and perhaps an attraction to the wildness of the Hell's Angels motivated his earlier point of view, but by the time he comes to his final analysis, he sees the Hell's Angels for what they are; uneducated losers attempting to roll back progress, fighting the future. "This wavering paradox is a pillar of the outlaw stance. A man who has blown all his options can't afford the luxury of changing his ways. He has to capitalize on whatever he has left, and can't afford to admit - no matter how often he's reminded of it - that every day of his life takes him farther down a blind alley."

View all my reviews