Quick Review: THINKING ABOUT IT ONLY MAKES IT WORSE by David Mitchell (Faber)

A superb collection of Mitchell’s Observer columns

Why is my jumper depreciating? What’s wrong with calling a burglar brave? Why are people so f***ing hung up about swearing? Why do the asterisks in that sentence make it okay? Why do so many people want to stop other people doing things, and how can they be stopped from stopping them? Why is every film and TV programme a sequel or a remake? Why are we so reliant on perpetual diversion that someone has created chocolate toothpaste? Is there anything to be done about the Internet?

These and many other questions trouble David Mitchell as he delights us with a tour of the absurdities of modern life – from Ryanair to Downton Abbey, sports day to smoking, nuclear weapons to phone etiquette, UKIP to hotdogs made of cats. Funny, provocative and shot through with refreshing amounts of common sense, Thinking About It Only Makes It Worse celebrates and commiserates on the state of things in our not entirely glorious nation.

David Mitchell is a comedian, actor, writer and the polysyllabic member of Mitchell and Webb. He won BAFTAs for Peep Show and That Mitchell and Webb Look, and has also starred in Jam and Jerusalem, The Bleak Old Shop of Stuff and Ambassadors. He writes for the Observer, chairs TheUnbelievable Truth, is a team captain on Would I Lie To You? and has been in two films, neither of which made a profit.

I have long been a fan of David Mitchell’s television work – That Mitchell & Webb Look, Peep Show (which I was actually didn’t love at first), the all-too-short Ambassadors mini-series, and his frequent guest spots on QI and Have I Got News For You being my favourites. After I listened to the audio edition of his superb memoir, Back Story, my respect for him grew even more (it’s among my top ten ‘reads’ of the year, easily). I didn’t know how frequently he had been writing for the Observer, however, so I was pleasantly surprised when I received a review copy of Thinking About It Only Makes It Worse. This is a great read.

Upcoming: “The Secret History of Wonder Woman” by Jill Lepore (Knopf)

I am a huge fan of Jill Lepore’s writing – both long-form and also her journalism and shorter pieces. A professor of American History at Harvard University (and a staff writer at The New Yorker), Lepore has written extensively about history and how we interpret, teach, and read the history of the United States. Last year, I read the paperback edition of The Story of America, which was easily one of the best books I read in 2013. Perhaps of more interest to the readers of Civilian Reader, though, her upcoming work is about the fan-favourite Amazon warrior from the Justice League: Wonder Woman. Due to be published on October 28th, 2014 by Knopf. Here’s the rather long synopsis:

Wonder Woman, created in 1941, is the most popular female superhero of all time. Aside from Superman and Batman, no superhero has lasted as long or commanded so vast and wildly passionate a following. In the more than seven decades since she first appeared, her comic books have never been out of print. In years of interviews and archival research, Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore has uncovered an astonishing trove of documents, including the never-before-seen private papers of William Moulton Marston, Wonder Woman’s creator. Lepore has discovered that, from Marston’s days as a Harvard undergraduate, he was influenced by early suffragists and feminists, starting with the British suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst, who was banned from speaking on campus in 1911, when Marston was a freshman. In the 1920s, Marston and his wife brought into their home, as Marston’s mistress, the niece of Margaret Sanger, one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century. The Marston family story – a house of one man, three women, and four children-is a story of drama, intrigue, and irony. In the 1930s, Marston and Sanger’s niece together wrote a regular column for Family Circle celebrating conventional family life, even as they pursued a life of extraordinary nonconformity. No less fascinating is Marston’s role as the inventor of the lie detector. Internationally known as an expert on truth, he lived a life of secrets-only to spill them on the pages of the Wonder Woman comics he began writing in 1941.

The Secret History of Wonder Woman is a tour-de-force of intellectual and cultural history, explaining not only the mysterious origins of the world's most famous female superhero, but solving some of the most vexing puzzles in the American past. Wonder Woman, Lepore argues, is the missing link in the history of the struggle for women’s rights – a chain of events that begins with the women’s suffrage campaigns of the early 1900s and ends with the troubled place of feminism a century later.

Given how prominent the character has been in not only the comics and SFF communities (specifically the absence of plans for a Wonder Woman big-budget movie), but in pop-culture and gender studies communities, this is a very timely book. I’m really looking forward to this.

Mini-Review: “The Owl Who Liked Sitting on Caesar” by Martin Windrow (Bantam Press)

An endearing memoir of one man and his owl

When author Martin Windrow met the tawny owlet that he christened Mumble, it was love at first sight. Raising her from a fledgling, through adolescence and into her prime years, Windrow recorded every detail of their time living together (secretly) in a south London tower block, and later in a Sussex village. This is the touching, intriguing and eccentric story of their 15-year relationship, complete with photographs and illustrations of the beautiful Mumble. Along the way, we are given fascinating insight into the ornithology of owls - from their evolution and biology to their breeding habits and hunting tactics. The Owl Who Liked Sitting on Caesar is a witty, quirky and utterly charming account of the companionship between one man and his owl.

This is a book that doesn’t require much of a review. It is an endearing, amusing, and also moving account of an editor’s life and experiences as the owner of an owl. An interesting, short book.

“Floating City” by Sudhir Venkatesh (Allen Lane)

A thoroughly engaging study of hustlers, strivers, dealers, call girls and other lives in illicit New York

After his insider’s study of Chicago crack gangs electrified the academy, Columbia University sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh spent a decade immersed in New York’s underbelly, observing the call girls, drug dealers, prostitutes and other strivers that make up this booming underground economy.

Amidst the trust-funder cocktail parties, midtown strip clubs, and immigrant-run sex shops, he discovers a surprisingly fluid and dynamic social world – one that can be found in global cities everywhere – as traditional boundaries between class, race and neighbourhood dissolve. In Floating City, Venkatesh explores New York from high to low, tracing the invisible threads that bind a handful of ambitious urban hustlers, from a Harvard-educated socialite running a high-end escort service to a Harlem crack dealer adapting to changing demands by selling cocaine to hedge fund managers and downtown artists. In the process, and as he questions his own reasons for going deeper into this subterranean world, Venkatesh finds something truly unexpected – community.

Floating City is Venkatesh’s journey through the “vast invisible continent” of New York's underground economy – a thriving yet largely unseen world that exists in parallel to our own, at the heart of every city.

I first came across Sudhir Venkatesh’s name in Freakonomics – as, I’m sure, did many non-sociologists. In Levitt’s book, Venkatesh contributed a small selection of his work with the crack gangs in Chicago. This study would go on to form much of Gang Leader For A Day, the author’s previous book. Venkatesh is a rare academic: he can write in such an engaging, riveting style, that his books read almost like novels. In Floating City, the ethnographer turns his gaze on New York City and its underground economy. This is, while flawed in minor ways, easily one of the best non-fiction works I’ve read in a number of years.

Excerpt: “The Tudors” by Peter Ackroyd (Macmillan)

Something a little different, today. As I’m sure I’ve mentioned elsewhere on the blog, I’m a huge fan of history (if you also happen to follow Politics Reader, you will have seen that there, too). I studied medieval history at school, and have maintained a life-long interest in this period. So, I am very happy to share with you a short extract from the second volume of Peter Ackroyd’s exceptional History Of England, The Tudors (Macmillan).

Chapter I

HALLELUJAH

The land was flowing with milk and honey. On 21 April 1509 the old king, having grown ever more harsh and rapacious, died in his palace at Richmond on the south bank of the Thames. The fact was kept secret for two days, so that the realm would not tremble. Yet the new Henry had already been proclaimed king. On 9 May the body of Henry VII was taken in a black chariot from Richmond Palace to St Paul’s Cathedral; the funeral car was attended by 1,400 formal mourners and 700 torch-bearers. But few, if any, grieved; the courtiers and household servants were already awaiting the son and heir. When the body, having been taken to the abbey of Westminster, after the funeral service was over, was lowered into its vault the heralds announced ‘le noble roy, Henri le Septie’me, est mort’. Then at once they cried out with one voice, ‘Vive le noble roy, Henri le Huitie’me ’. His title was undisputed, the first such easy succession in a century. The new king was in his seventeenth year.

Books On Film: “Accidental Billionaires”, by Ben Mezrich (Random House)

This review was originally posted quite a while back on my non-fiction blog, here. I decided to re-post it because of the high-profile movie adaptation (The Social Network) that is released very soon (October 1st in the USA). The script was also written by my favourite TV/Movie Screenwriter, Aaron Sorkin (West Wing, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, Charlie Wilson’s War), so I also wanted to do my bit to increase awareness even just a little bit.

Giving us the history of an internet tool so many millions of people have come to rely on (or just become addicted to), in a manner that is entertaining and more-or-less without bias, Mezrich has written a book worthy of out attention, whether you use Facebook or not.

Here’s what I had to say after reading the book (with just a few tweaks and additions, and the movie trailer at the end)…

*     *     *

They just wanted to meet girls…

At Harvard, social acceptance and success with the opposite sex had to be applied for. In the absence of family money or innate charisma, misfit and maths prodigy Eduardo Saverin deamed of joining one of Harvard’s elite Final clubs. His best friend, painfully shy computer genius Mark Zuckerberg, turned instead to his natural talents, hacking into the university’s computer system to create a rateable database of every female student on campus.

Narrowly escaping expulsion after 80% of Harvard’s population voted in just two hours, crashing the entire computer system, Mark and Eduardo together refocused the site into something less controversial – ‘The Facebook’ – which spread like wildfire across campuses around the country. Within months, hundreds of thousands of college kids had signed up.

Suddenly Eduardo and Mark were getting nods not just from the female population, but from venture capitalists too. It was then, amidst the dizzying levels of cash and the promise of unbelievable power, that the first cracks in their friendship started to appear, and what began as a simple argument spiralled into an out-and-out war. The great irony is that Facebook succeeded by bringing people together – but its very success tore two best friends apart.

In Accidental Billionaires, Mezrich (author of Bringing Down the House) tells us the story of Facebook – from its creation and first steps all the way to world domination. It is the story of two guys at Harvard trying to improve their social standing, to meet girls – one, Eduardo Saverin, through “punching” a Final Club; the other, Mark Zuckerberg, by making a “killer app” to impress others.

From the first Harvard-based website Zuckerberg wrote – “Facemash”, a late-night reaction to a girl dumping him – to his limited work on a soon-to-be rival website, “HarvardConnection”, and on to Facebook’s incredible rise in the internet world, the story takes us through every step of Zuckerberg and Saverin’s journey – the highs, the lows, the betrayals and the attacks. Saverin had the business savvy Zuckerberg needed to get the site launched, and was arguably his best friend at Harvard. The story is also a refutation, in this age, of Saverin’s initial belief that

“You didn’t get popular by writing computer code. A computer program couldn’t get you laid”

His partnership with Zuckerberg would change both of their lives forever, and make them far more popular and famous than they could have imagined.

Facemash had the unfortunate effect of crashing the university servers as 80% of Harvard students voted on who they believed was the hottest girl on campus (something that didn’t exactly endear its creator to the administration or campus feminists). Narrowly avoiding expulsion, Zuckerberg was approached by Divya Narendra and identical rowing twins, Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, to help them with their own networking site (meant to make hooking up more time-efficient). Zuckerberg agreed, but never really did any work for them, instead focusing on his own site, “thefacebook.com”. The Winklevoss twins and Divya saw thefacebook as a theft of their idea, and they eventually filed a lawsuit against Zuckerberg, obviously not succeeding in their aim of shutting Facebook down, which instead spread like wildfire through campuses across America, and then beyond.

The author explains how, to Mark, rather than the potential for social betterment,

“it’s likely that the cool thing [about Facebook] was the math that was going to go into it – the computer science of the task, the code at the heart of the Web-site idea.”

Zuckerberg comes across as a strange character – a true hacker-geek, somewhat disinterested in money, more interested in the world online than out in the real world. His character develops and changes as thefacebook grows – at times he comes across as cold, even ruthless when countering accusations of plagiarism in the site; other times he appears disconnected from the world; at other times he seems mischievous. His is clearly a personality that is difficult to nail down or decipher – bizarre for the person who has created the ultimate online socialising tool. Equally ironic, and tragic, is the fact that, while their creation brought hundreds of thousands of people closer, their rapid and unprecedented success ultimately tore their friendship apart as a simple disagreement spiralled out of control into out-and-out war.

This narrative account (which the author admits to taking a pinch of authorial license to create a proper chronological flow) was drawn from hundreds of interviews, emails and conversations with some of those involved – most remain anonymous, though Eduardo Saverin and Tyler Winklevoss seem to have been considerable and loquacious sources, while Zuckerberg declined to be interviewed at all for the book. The absence of Zuckerberg’s input is noticeable, and there’s no doubt that the book would have benefited from his perspective – especially with regards to the lawsuits, personal relationships, and those times when he was away from his colleagues and friends. Despite the bad blood between the Facebook founders, Saverin’s portrayal of Zuckerberg remains largely positive, or at least neutral, throughout the book – which is a good testament to Saverin’s character.

As well as the story of Facebook, Accidental Billionaires gives the reader an interesting window into Ivy League campus life and also the world of Harvard’s Final Clubs – the exclusive university fraternities, membership to which can change anyone’s life, both at college and after. With names like Phoenix and Porcellian, it’s a little difficult to take them seriously at first glance. But, when you consider that the latter (sometimes referred to as “The Porc”) counts President Teddy Roosevelt and a considerable number of highly influential US politicians from the late 19th and early 20th Centuries as members, it’s clear that they’re a social force to be reckoned with.

Mezrich shows how, in many ways, Facebook is just an online distillation of what defines college life: sex. Regardless of your social standing, the author posits, there is nothing that can’t be linked with this drive.

“Even at Harvard, the most exclusive school in the world, it was all really about sex. Getting it, or not getting it.”

Thefacebook would have an “undercurrent of sex”, while not being as explicit about it as other, existing networking sites (e.g. Match.com). The website’s “Looking For”, “Relationship Status” and “Interested Features” were basically “the résumé items that were at the heart of [the] college experience”. While the site has evolved into something much more varied and… well, perhaps ‘high-brow’ is not the word, but it’s certainly about more than just sex. At some universities and colleges, it remains the principle tool for social-climbing, ramping up the number of “friends” you have, making connections, and so forth. But now it is so much more – it’s become a place for reconnecting with long-lost or forgotten school friends, getting to know new friends, Facebook stalking, and sharing interesting or amusing internet content (editorial cartoons, articles, music videos, and let’s not forget book reviews, of course). Saverin and Zuckerberg gave birth to an internet juggernaut, one that keeps evolving and spreading, and truly changed the way millions of people live their lives and interact with others – whether this is a good or bad development is up to you to decide.

Overall, Accidental Billionaires is a very well written, engaging book. Mezrich’s style is very accessible, conversational and manages to make the story of a website actually quite gripping. The book is a very fast read, Mezrich’s writing just pulls you along, with frequently funny and illuminating passages and anecdotes. Accidental Billionaires is as addictively readable as its subject matter is usable, and is one of the most intriguing and enjoyable non-fiction books I’ve read in a long time.

Highly recommended to all.

Also try: Scott Turow, One L (1997); Philip Delves-Broughton, What They Teach At Harvard Business School (2007); Tom Wolfe, I Am Charlotte Simmons (2005); John Battelle, The Search (2008)

By the Same Author: Bringing Down the House, Ugly Americans, Busting Vegas, Rigged (and others)

*     *     *

“No Angel”, by Jay Dobyns & Nils Johnson-Shelton (Canongate)

This review has been cross-posted on our other (non-fiction) site.

US   |   UK

An ATF agent goes undercover with the Hell’s Angels

The first federal agent to infiltrate the inner circle of the outlaw Hells Angels Motorcycle Club, and the inside story of the 21-month operation that almost cost him his family, his sanity, and his life.

Getting shot in the chest as a rookie agent, bartering for machine guns, throttling down the highway at 100 mph, and responding to a full-scale, bloody riot between the Hells Angels and their rivals, the Mongols – these are just a few of the high-adrenaline experiences Dobyns recounts in this action-packed true story.

Dobyns leaves no stone of his harrowing journey unturned. At runs and clubhouses, between rides and riots, Dobyns befriends bad-ass bikers, meth-fueled “old ladies”, gun fetishists, psycho-killer ex-cons, and even some of the “Filthy Few” – the elite of the Hells Angels who’ve committed extreme violence on behalf of their club. Eventually, at parties staged behind heavily armed security, he meets legendary club members such as Chuck Zito, Johnny Angel, and the godfather of all bikers, Ralph “Sonny” Barger. To blend in with them, he gets full-arm ink; to win their respect, he vows to prove himself a stone-cold killer.

Hardest of all is leading a double life, which has him torn between his devotion to his wife and children, and his pledge to become the first federal agent ever to be “fully patched” into the Angels’ near-impregnable ranks. His act is so convincing that he comes within a hairsbreadth of losing himself. Eventually, he realizes that just as he’s been infiltrating the Hells Angels, they’ve been infiltrating him. And just as they’re not all bad, he’s not all good.

No Angel has been described as the new Donnie Brasco and the most in-depth account of the world of Outlaw Biker Gangs since Hunter Thompson’s seminal work, Hell’s Angels (which I might also review one day). In No Angel, we get a riveting account of an undercover ATF agent’s experiences infiltrating the notorious outlaw biker gang – from the initial forays into that world; the scary moment when another biker accuses them of not being genuine (which carries a death penalty); the team’s year-long mission to gain respect and trust in the eyes of local Hells Angels; Dobyn’s eventual prospecting and ‘patching in’ with the Hells Angels; and finally the investigation’s big bust at its completion.

I must admit to the source of my initial interest in this book: I’ve been watching Sons of Anarchy, which is brilliant and has put me in the mood to learn/read/watch more about bikers and their culture, so I ordered this book on the strength of a Newsweek excerpt I remember reading a couple years ago.

Dobyns gives the biker gangs a quite funny acronym: “OMGs”. As someone who hates emoticons and text-speak, I was very amused by this. They are, however, nothing to laugh about: as “America’s only truly indigenous form of international organized crime” – one that has spread alarmingly easily and well-managed – “violence was and is the [main] source of the Hells Angels’ power.”

The ATF’s and other federal law departments’ interest in biker gangs had, prior to the investigation detailed herein, largely been small-scale, and not particularly rewarding or sensational: small-time drugs and weapons charges. With Operation Black Biscuit, the ATF was hoping to slap a great big RICO charge against the Hells Angels. This would require dedication, a long and dangerous investigation. The main impetus for this operation – or at least something that heightened its importance and the increased attention from the federal government – was based largely on the Hells Angels-Mongols rumble at a Laughlin casino, which resulted in a small number of deaths and a large number of hospitalisations (amazingly, though, no civilians were seriously harmed, if at all).

Dobyns goes into a great amount of detail, outlining not only his own investigation, but also gives us a look into the ATF’s past experiences with outlaw biker gangs. He highlights one of the stranger issues:

“some biker investigators assimilate and sympathize with their adversaries. Some even form their own clubs. This has always been a mystery to me. Cops don’t mimic mafia dons or dress as Crips and Bloods and form up neighborhood sets, so why would some choose to create their own motorcycle clubs patterned after criminal syndicates? Maybe it’s because they’re bound by the bikes themselves – one thing that cuts across all of them is the ‘live to ride, ride to live’ credo – but I wouldn’t know since I don’t really love bikes. Go figure.”

This, I must say, I found surprising – I would have thought a perfect agent to send undercover would be one who loved bikes. But, considering the tendency of biker lovers to ‘go native’, perhaps a non-bike-lover was the better choice. In the past, Dobyns explains, “these forces – a disregard for their legitimacy from above, a wary respect and kinship from below – combined to give the bikers some semblance of a safe haven.”

It’s worth mentioning the unfortunate role of women in these worlds – both that of the bikers’ and undercover cops’. No Angel is filled with descriptions of the sorry state of a woman’s lot in the biker world. They are treated very poorly by the bikers. Dobyns explains that many of them were, or appeared to be “old, broken-down women”, who had “been living too hard for too long”:

“Some were attractive, some looked like mudflaps on a snowy day in March.”

Ultimately, they are little more than toys or objects to be passed around and (horrifyingly frequently) shared.

“The women walked away. The backs of their jackets had single patches that read PROPERTY OF THE RED DEVILS. This referred to both the women and the jackets.”

When it comes to female undercover agents, there were problems with finding “Bird”, his undercover alter-ego, a believable and competent “old lady”:

“I’m of the minority opinion in law enforcement circles that women are as capable and essential as men are in undercover assignments, but the truth is they have a hard road to walk. Most of the time they play girlfriends, runners, or mules. What I needed was a woman the Hell’s Angels would actually respect.”

The many horrific, dark and depressing moments mentioned in No Angel – drug ravaged people, child neglect, etc. – are weirdly contrasted with some quite amusing moments and scenes. One, which was particularly funny, is Dobyns’s account of when he and two other tattooed and burly bikers metrosexed it up while waiting for their club president, talking about the aloe in sunscreen before doing each other’s backs: “three bikers rubbing suncream into each other on a hot Phoenix night”. Or when Dobyns mentions his “love [of] the seasonals at Starbucks”; in this case the Halloween seasonal, a “pumpkin-flavored latte with brown sugar cinnamon sprinkles’ which the hulking, tattooed outlaw biker gets “with extra foam and low-fat milk. Totally lame, but there you go.” It’s moments like these that show how, despite his tough-guy image, he’s still human like the rest of us, with eccentricities.

The effect Dobyns’s undercover life has on his home life is interesting. Beyond the expected family tension one might expect from a father and husband who is absent a good deal of the time, the nature of Dobyns’s undercover work, the fact that he has to allow his role to consume him, can make normalcy difficult to achieve. For example, at a neighbourhood party:

“I must have looked like a circus attraction at that party. I was strung out, and fresh tattoos peeked out from the edges of my clothing. I was the only guest with a twisted five-inch corkscrew goatee, that’s for sure.”

His embrace of the biker role meant he couldn’t relate to the people he was supposed to be comfortable around.

“All I could think was that I’d rather be hanging out with my guys. Not just Timmy, Pops, and JJ, but Smitty, Dennis, Bob, Joby – any of them. I didn’t like them more, but I didn’t feel so weird around them.”

For Dobyns (and also myself), the contradictions of the Hell’s Angels are fascinating. The author explains:

“The Hells Angels are separate from society, but they’re rooted in it; they’re noncomformist, but they all look the same; they’re a secret society, but also flamboyant exhibitionists; they flout the laws of the land, but they’re governed by a strict code; their name and their Death Head logo represent freedom, individualism, toughness, and lawlessness, but both name and logo are protected by legal trademarks.”

The camaraderie described by the authors is amazing – it really does give the Hells Angels the feel of a brotherhood – if you were accepted by one, you could be vouched to another – leading to invitations to rallies and parties, all making your time with them blessed.

The internal politics of the club were interesting. As time has passed, there appears to be a growing the rift between young and old members of the club. Covering almost all aspects of club business and function, the issue of drug use and trade, general comportment of members, and also – most importantly – the future direction of the Hells Angels club. Basically, the real-life tension portrayed by the Sons of Anarchy club (only reversed, as it’s the younger SoA Vice-President who wants to take the club in a legitimate direction).

“Generally, younger members felt as though they’d joined the Hells Angels to raise hell, to do what they wanted to, when they wanted to, and not be told otherwise. Older members – members, it should be said, who’d lived this freer, hell-raising lifestyle in decades past – preferred to rest on their laurels, doing whatever they could not to attract attention from the law.”

Following the suspicious, sudden murder of the Hells Angels’ heir-apparent – Daniel “Hoover” Seybert – Dobyns believes the internal tensions are simmering ever-closer to the edge, and might even have been the cause of Hoover’s murder (he was considered one of those wanting a calmer life and more legit club). He and his team started to hear more and more grumbling from the younger members about the strict, softening older members.

The investigation called for Dobyns and his crew to form a biker gang, which they do – an Arizona charter of the Solo Angeles. As they get deeper into the world, tighter with its denizens, and rack up countless drug and gun buys, they still recognise the need to break out of their comfort zones in order to blow the case wide open and make it really count. Dobyns outlines many of these small deals, illustrating the ease with which some of them were completed, the almost blasé attitude the criminals had to buying and selling illegal (often modified) guns or drugs. The slow pace of the operation also created stress within the ATF group as to how best to approach the problem.

“I wanted to pursue the Angels’ offers of membership. How often had a group of cops been given this opportunity? ... I felt we’d never get the true dirt on them as outsiders, that they could profess to trust us Solos till they were blue in the face, but it would never matter because we weren’t Hells Angels. If we wanted to take a swing at these guys... then this was the only way. My answer to break out of the comfort zone was to become a Hells Angel, to give ourselves over to our adversary.”

Given the considerable courting from established Hells Angels charters, and their respected, older members, it’s not surprising that Dobyns wanted to push as hard as possible for membership – literally to be invited into the belly of the beast. Slats, the operation’s ATF leader, had a different perspective. He preferred them to stay Solos, to maintain their relative freedom, but to push for more and bigger deals, to effectively make the Hells Angels’ own greed push them to work with the Solos. Also, if Dobyns and his fellow undercovers became Hells Angels prospects, then “our operation would become tied to the whims of the club and our sponsors.” As Solos, however, “we could do whatever we wanted, whenever we wanted, wherever we wanted.” Dobyns is honest enough to concede that his approach may not have been best: “Slats is expert in the criminal mindset, and he might have been right, too.” When the decision was made, one thing is clear: the members of the task were supremely driven, even zealous – despite their solid case, which would have sent some shockwaves through the Hells Angels, they all wanted to push for a bigger, more devastating case. Their egos didn’t allow them to settle for a smaller bust.

No Angel is a gripping read – I found myself picking it up at every opportunity, and annoyed whenever I was forced to put it down (real life always has a tendency to get in the way of reading...). The glimpse we get of the bikers’ world is not a glamorous one, and yet Dobyns manages to deal with his subject in a balanced manner – his righteousness and hatred for much of it is evident throughout, but he’s not dishonest about the allures the lifestyle and the world present to those who are invited into it.

The writing is tight and stripped down, so you’ll find that you fly through the book. There are the occasional moments of normalcy, when Dobyns goes home to see his wife – his love for his family is clear, and sometimes leads to some slightly soppy chapters – it seems laid on a little thickly, if I’m honest. The strain his undercover work puts on his marriage is also fairly portrayed – he actually takes most of the blame for the difficult situation and stress.

Filled with colourful characters, riveting detail of the bikers’ criminal underbelly, No Angel is a gripping and entertaining account of life as an undercover agent, a detailed account of the dark world of bikers, and highly recommended.

Also try: Hunter S. Thompson, Hell’s Angels (2003); Kerrie Droban, Running With the Devil: The True Story of the ATF’s Infiltration of the Hell’s Angels (2009)*; Ralph ‘Sonny’ Barger, Hell’s Angels (2001), Ridin’ High, Livin’ Free (2003) & Freedom: Credos from the Road (2005); William Marsden & Julian Sher, Angels of Death: Inside the Bikers’ Global Crime Empire (2007); William Queen, Under & Alone (2010); George Wethern & Vincent Colnett, Wayward Angel: The Full Story of the Hell’s Angels (2008); Andrew Shaylor, Hell’s Angels Motorcycle Club (2007); Sons of Anarchy Seasons 1 & 2 (2009, 2010)

* Running With the Devil appears to parallel some of No Angel, and even ‘Bird’ is mentioned. It doesn’t seem to have been received as well, however.