Customer comments on this selection.
Pictures of MC life Beautiful pictures and an interesting view of the MC world from inside one of the most important (the Outlaws) - and written from an Outlaws member, not a simple reporter.
A must-have for every biker.
The Real Deal I can see why this is such a classic book. The photos show what it must have been really like to be around an outlaw club in the 60s. The essays, while sometimes hard to follow, give a look into who these people were. No glamorization, just cold, hard reality.
Damn, I knew some of these guys..... I purchased this to give to a friend who is just getting into riding, to give him an idea of what it was like 'back in the day'. When it arrived, I opened it to take a look at it and looking out of these old photos were the faces of some of the people that I had known back in the early and mid 60's......
To make a long story short, I let him take a look at the new book that I had bought myself...and kept it.
Amazing pictures! Looking back into the past is alway problematic as our vision of "how things were" rarely jive with reality. We carry pictures in our minds of people and incidents from our past, but when confronted with real images it's a bit of a shocker.
Danny sure drives that nail home with this book.
The prose is as stunning as the photographs. Danny Lyon was a young photographer, living in Chicago in the mid-1960s, and went with a friend to a biker's outing in Wisconsin. He eventually immersed himself in this subculture of men, women and bikes, creating photos that are now an archaeological document of a lost time.
Not only are the photos provocative and fascinating, but Lyon writes with a grace and brevity that remind me of Ernest Hermingway (another Chicagoan). Here is one sample:
"Back then in Chicago, they had a lot of names for things, names that were of the Midwest and of that city, words belonging to that place and to the people who lived there. One of those words was bikeriders..."
One will see in the images that the photographer carries his 1960s intelligence and mind into the people's lives. This is not a book about biker fashions and being cool. It is a chronicle of how some rejected the standard ways in society and set up their own rules of how to live. In their freedom and wandering, the bikeriders exemplify the lost Americans who are forever in search of sensation and meaning.
The Bikeridiers
This book was very interesting and gave in-site into motorcycle riding, and riders of years past. I found it a little bit hard to read. this is written in the sixties with all the lingo of the day. Through all this I feel any motorcycle enthusiast will enjoy the reading. I also enjoyed all the pictures. They show the styles of the era and the way people customized their bikes.
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