Bullies

Starred review from November 30, 2015
A childhood antagonism becomes a complex appreciation among adults in a biker gang in this tragicomic exploration of male violence and bonding. Journalist Abramovich was bullied (as he remembers it) by Trevor Latham in elementary school. Upon reconnecting many years later, after Latham founded the East Bay Rats Motorcycle Club in Oakland, he gets along famously with his erstwhile nemesis. He steeps himself in the Rats’ goofy outlaw culture, with its fight parties (typical bill: two Jews vs. two Gentiles), heavy drinking, good-natured gunplay, and japes such as painting the club’s name on a beached whale. But he perceives a darker side—claustrophobic enmities, savage beatings of homeless people—and wonders whether Latham’s charisma might be a kind of sociopathy. Abramovich sets the story against a vivid portrait of a blighted, crime-ridden Oakland seething with warrior bands, including an organized-crime family associated with Your Black Muslim Bakery, Occupy Oakland militants, and the riot police they battled. (“I don’t care about the politics... I’m only here for the violence,” Latham exults after instigating one such confrontation.) Abramovich’s sharp-eyed, entertaining reportage unfolds like a mash-up of The Wild One, Fight Club, and Jackass; his examination of the Rats’ worldview is sympathetic and nuanced, but squarely faces the group’s dysfunctions and the troubling questions they raise about American society. Photos.

December 15, 2015
A journalist's account of his friendship with a man who was not only president of a motorcycle group, but also the boy who bullied him during childhood. Abramovich met Trevor Latham, president of the East Bay Rats Motorcycle Club, when the two were fourth-graders growing up on Long Island. They often fought in the schoolyard, but as children from dysfunctional, single-parent homes, both boys also had a deep affinity for each other. Their contact ended when Abramovich moved with his often jobless father in sixth grade. It was not until years later that he reconnected with Trevor, who now lived in Oakland. On an assignment for GQ to do a story about their friendship, the author traveled from New York to experience Trevor's blue-collar world of motorcycles and "systemized" violence. Once back in New York, however, the story would not let him go. So Abramovich returned to Oakland to work on a book about Trevor and the Rats, and a six-month visit eventually turned into a four-year stay. His investigations led him to explore Oakland's history, from its origins as bucolic California land grant territory to its evolution into one of the most crime-infested cities in America. He also learned about the tortured history of the Rats and witnessed the bloody infighting that threatened to tear the group apart. Research eventually revealed that before films like Stanley Kramer's The Wild One (1953) celebrated an underground subculture of leather and machismo, motorcycle associations in America had been called "sweater clubs" and had attracted the likes of Clark Gable and Barbara Stanwyck. Thoughtful and engaging, Abramovich's book suggests an intricate connection between an especially violent city and the "cracked, broken homes" that constitute them. Those homes ultimately give rise to "cracked, broken" children--like the author and Trevor--who seek makeshift families like the Rats or other gangs and take a "casual acceptance of bloodshed" as the status quo. A sharp, provocative memoir of an unlikely friendship.

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April 1, 2016

Abramovich is a journalist who grew up on Long Island. In the early 1980s, when he was in fourth grade, he was bullied by a boy named Trevor Latham. In 2006, Abramovich happened to learn that Latham had become a bouncer and had started a motorcycle club, the East Bay Rats, in Oakland. Intrigued, Abramovich pitched the story of Latham and the Rats to GQ and headed for Oakland to meet Latham for the first time in more than 20 years. Ultimately, Abramovich moved there for several years and wrote this book, which isn't so much about Latham or bullying as it is about Oakland, the motorcycle club culture, masculinity, violence, and the meaning of family and friendship. The story is brutal at times-the Rats sponsored regular "fight nights" and lived in a part of town where crimes were many and police were few-but also funny, touching, and occasionally ludicrous. The Rats referred to Abramovich as their "embedded" journalist, and while he resisted the phrase, he certainly got to know them and their community, which was, in fact, at times very much like a war zone. VERDICT Urban teens in particular may find much to connect with in this gritty tale of a changing city and some of the men who struggled to find a place in it.-Sarah Flowers, formerly with Santa Clara County (CA) Library

Copyright 2016 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2016
As a child, author Abramovich was bullied by Trevor Latham. Remarkably, as adults, he and Latham reconnect after Abramovich sees Latham online, advertising Latham's gang, Oakland's East Bay Rats. What starts as a six-month visit to write a piece for GQ becomes a cross-country move, four years as an honorary Rat, and an engaging expose on economic disparity and violence in the Bay Area. Along with the story of his unusual friendship with Latham, Abramovich offers a detailed account of the Rats, their motorcycles, fight parties, excessive vandalism, and other antics of epic proportionstagging whales, exploding propane tanks, burning pianos in the streetsand the curious fact that they lacked some of the most unfortunate characteristics commonly associated with gangs, such as racism, homophobia, and drugs. In the course of recounting his day-to-day life with the Rats, Abramovich examines Oakland history, from its beginnings to its economic decline into one of the country's most dangerous cities. Abramovich leaves Oakland after the Occupy movement, poignantly concluding that there is really no difference between street fights and street theater. Abramovich's personable yet straightforward style makes this an engaging, even touching read.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)