If you have the slightest interest in biker culture you'll want to read this book. Sonny Barger, founder and erstwhile President of the Hell's Angels Motorcycle Club, has at last gone into print to give the lowdown on the remarkable lifetsyle of the ultimate outlaw biker.

From the formation of the Oakland chapter of the Hell's Angels by Barger and Don "Boots" Reeves in April 1957, through the consolidation of the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club across California in the sixties, and across the whole of the US in the seventies, Sonny Barger was right there up front.

During the seventies as the club continued to expand world-wide Barger and the Oakland Angels moved into their "gangster era", selling drugs and engaging in territorial disputes with other clubs. By the eighties they had become targets for a string of heavy handed government prosecutions including the infamous RICO charges, attempting to make the Hell's Angels an illegal organisation. Barger presided over all of this and dealt with each new crisis with a "fuck the world" attitude that beat the US government, and walked away from a thirty year jail sentence after serving just five years on the inside.

In 1982 he faced the biggest challenge of his career when he was diagnosed with advanced cancer of the throat and underwent a laryngectomy. He now talks through a small device fitted to his windpipe which, he says, makes him sound like Marlon Brando in "The Godfather". Now living in sunny Cave Creek, Arizona, he still bench-presses 285 pounds and rides his Harley FXRT every day.

Sonny Barger swaggers through this remarkable life with an uncompromising dedication to bikes, booze, girls and good times that defines a life lived to the full. And here for the first time is Sonny's account of what really happened at Altamont; his previously unpublished views on Hunter S. Thompson and Peter Fonda, Jack Nicholson and Keith Richards, and what he really thinks about Harley-Davidsons and Hondas.

The book was published in the UK in August 2000, and we can recommend it as one of the the wildest reads you'll ever have.