Bullies: A Friendship

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.