"Probably the most powerful and well known outlaw motorcyclist in the country." So began one of Ralph "Sonny" Barger's many police rap sheets from the 1970s, and for good reason. Barger, immortalised in Hunter S Thompson's book Hell's Angels and star of the biker movie Hell's Angels 69 has, and to many people remains, the de facto "Chief" of America's Hell's Angels bikers. In Hell's Angel: The Life and Times of Sonny Barger and the Hell's Angels Motorcycle Club, the biker from hell finally tells the whole story of nearly 50 years riding at the head of the Angels.

Hells Angel is a very brutal, honest book, and isn't for the politically sensitive or those who want a romantic account of post-war American subcultural life. It is, however, a fascinating story of Barger's life and scrapes. Growing up in Oakland, northern California, Barger was kicked out of the army for enlisting underage, and then set up his own Hell' s Angels in 1957, with the sole intention "to party and ride". "As our membership grew, we began to look like an army", and the stories pile up thick and fast of the increasing controversy that gathered around the Angels from the early 60s onwards. The use of Nazi regalia, the fights, the booze, the parties and the "old ladies" of the 1960s give way to the darker side of the Angels, with charges of beatings, kidnappings, murders and drug dealing in the 1970s (all of which Barger has been charged with at some time or another, as his helpful appendix of arrests, "The Rap-Up"). The later stages of the book are as Barger admits "one big blurry court trial" as the police tried to nail him for conspiracy throughout the 1980s, but the most interesting moments come with Barger's vivid (and often scathing) accounts of Hunter S Thompson, Ken Kesey, Neal Cassady, Jack Nicholas, and Mick Jagger, during the infamous Rolling Stones concert at Altamont in 1969. Hell's Angel is quite a story, and told by quite a survivor. --Jerry Brotton