His entry begins:I’m currently reading Hell’s Angel: The Life and Times of Sonny Barger and the Hell’s Angels Motorcycle Club by Sonny Barger and Keith Zimmerman. Barger was a founding member of the Oakland chapter of the Hell's Angels Motorcycle Club in 1957 and would go on to be president of the club for many years afterwards. Barger would attract considerable attention as a Hell's Angel and especially because of the prominent role he played in Hunter Thompson’s famous book, Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga. The book covers most of...[read on]About Born to Be Wild, from the publisher:
In 1947, 4,000 motorcycle hobbyists converged on Hollister, California. As images of dissolute bikers graced the pages of newspapers and magazines, the three-day gathering sparked theLearn more about Born to Be Wild at The University of North Carolina Press website.growth of a new subculture while also touching off national alarm. In the years that followed, the stereotypical leather-clad biker emerged in the American consciousness as a menace to law-abiding motorists and small towns. Yet a few short decades later, the motorcyclist, once menacing, became mainstream. To understand this shift, Randy D. McBee narrates the evolution of motorcycle culture since World War II. Along the way he examines the rebelliousness of early riders of the 1940s and 1950s, riders' increasing connection to violence and the counterculture in the 1960s and 1970s, the rich urban bikers of the 1990s and 2000s, and the factors that gave rise to a motorcycle rights movement. McBee's fascinating narrative of motorcycling's past and present reveals the biker as a crucial character in twentieth-century American life.
The Page 99 Test: Born to Be Wild.
Writers Read: Randy D. McBee.
--Marshal Zeringue
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