Outlaw Biker: My Life at Full Throttle

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Outlaw Biker: My Life at Full Throttle

POSTED: Monday, April 14, 2008, 5:58 PM

Kensington Publishing Corp., 191 pp., March 2008

A motorcycle diary

If you can get past the cartoony skull on the cover, the stigma of being seen reading a book with the subtitle “My Life at Full Throttle,” and the unlikelihood of a writing team composed of a 56-year-old one-eyed biker and an elderly English schoolteacher who resembles Dr. Ruth, you’ll have a good time getting to know Richard “Dead-Eye” Hayes, a take-no -prisoners Harley biker, in this memoir. Some gritting of teeth and nausea are sure to accompany you through anecdotes about how he lost his eye, his stint as a drug dealer and a pimp and his trips to Vegas with his brother Butch. Hayes spent the majority of his life as a member of the Los Valientes biker club raising hell while raising two daughters who want nothing to do with the biker lifestyle. The book is written as if Hayes is recounting memories from his journey in a frank, simple cadence from the next barstool over, which is endearing and allows the reader to get to know the burly, intimidating guy from the inside out. Hayes hand-wrote his memoirs on sheets of lined paper, which must have driven Mary Gardner stark-raving mad, but she managed to help organize the stories into themed chapters as opposed to writing a chronological tale, and that made the read much more interesting.

—Nadia Stadnycki

clay jones

Posted 2008-04-15 02:36:25

This is more about his life that happen in addition to the club.  Filled with antidotes that have little to do with MC life, he recounts with the ardor of a old man whit-ling on the front porch. Little is to learned from this book about the "OUTLAW" who wrote it and a lot is learned about Richard, the  boring family man with a lack luster life.

Posted by Carolyn Huckabay @ 5:58 PM Permalink | Post a comment

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