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Bullies: A Friendship Hardcover – Deckle Edge, March 8, 2016

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Alex Abramovich (Author)
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4.3 out of 5 stars 7 customer reviews
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Product Details

  • Hardcover: 224 pages
  • Publisher: Henry Holt and Co. (March 8, 2016)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0805094288
  • ISBN-13: 978-0805094282
  • Product Dimensions: 5.6 x 1 x 8.8 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #23,266 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Top Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 starsNot a Heartwarming Song of Closure
By No Reason on March 10, 2016
Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase
Read this book. Be warned, it is not a self-help book on overcoming childhood trauma. It is a nonfiction account of what happens when the author (Abramovich) reconnects with his childhood nemesis (Trevor), who daily tormented him in elementary school. In smooth, well-written prose Abramovich reports what he finds when he flies from New York to Oakland. Trevor works as a bouncer in a bar -- no surprise there -- but Abramovich is surprised when Trevor immediately accepts him as an old friend. Their childhood fighting is no impediment to friendship, rather it is the basis for camaraderie. Abramovich is invited into Trevor's world of bikers, booze, and belligerence, where "conversations could take sudden turns toward the freakish, or flat-out insane."

The book goes on to explain what happens when the chaotic meets the bizarre. With brief historical digressions, Abramovich describes the City of Oakland, some of the challenges it has overcome, and some that it still faces. Abramovich aptly describes present day Oakland as dysfunctional. Trevor seems quite at home. He accepts Oakland's dysfunction as canvas for his own expression. Trevor does not judge a situation as right-or-wrong, he just lives with it, as Abramovich illustrates when he notes that Trevor's common practice is to answer disjunctive questions with an always-correct affirmative answer, Q. "Does he always ride like that or is he just showing off?" A. "Yep." Trevor has surrounded himself with a group of bikers, encourages everyday people to put on boxing gloves, and confronts chaos with chaos. Abramovich faithfully reports what he sees.

There is no resolution -- the work is nonfiction -- life just goes on. However, there is closure. Abramovich's childhood bully has not changed, but Abramovich's perspective has. Confrontation is life, and it will continue.
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3.0 out of 5 starsA Cautionary Tale
By Sam Sattler on March 9, 2016
Format: Kindle Edition
Bullies represents itself to potential readers as an "account of one writer's unlikely friendship with his childhood bully," a premise likely to appeal to readers who as children experienced either side of the bullying equation. And for a rather brief few pages that is what it is - but all too quickly, the book changes into a social history of the city of Oakland, California, combined with the history of motorcycle clubs in that part of the state. Interesting as those topics may be, I suspect that many readers will be disappointed that so little time is devoted to the psychology of bullies and their victims.

Alex Abramovich and Trevor Latham first met in the mid-eighties inside a fourth grade classroom in Long Island, New York, but Alex was a year younger than Trevor, the boy who would become his "mortal enemy." The boys had a lot in common, mainly that formerly athletic fathers who had once raced motorcycles were raising both of them in single-parent households. Despite their similarities, the boys spent much of the next three years fighting, kicking, and clawing at each other. Trevor's impact on Alex's life was so great that by the end of the fourth grade Alex was playing hooky, and by the end of the fifth grade he was failing most of his classes. At the end of the sixth grade, Alex's father moved him from the area, but it was too late. The damage was already done, and five years after the relocation, Alex would drop out of high school.

Despite the miserable three years they shared, Alex did not think about Trevor again until the day he stumbled upon an Internet reference to him indicating that Trevor had moved to the West Coast where he "started a motorcycle club.Read more ›
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4.0 out of 5 starsMulti-layered and Engaging
By J. Schimel on March 13, 2016
Format: Hardcover
Alex Abramovich does something complex and multi-layered in “Bullies.” The surficial layer is his account of the East Bay Rats and particularly of Trevor Latham, his childhood nemesis and a deeply complex and interesting human. The second layer in is almost an ecological analysis of the Rat’s native habitat—Oakland, California—a troubled city with a long history of dysfunction and decay. Where else would you find the Rats? But finally, the deepest layer of the book is a more general social commentary about the U.S. and the conditions that created not only Oakland, but also the Rats and Biker Clubs more generally—people marginalized by society, even when some ostensibly function well within it. But Trevor is the glue that holds the book together, as he holds the Rats together—through his quirks and charisma. In the book, he is a powerful character that floats through the chaos, feeding on its energy, and sometimes catalyzing it.

As a result of this interweaving of themes, at the end I was left asking myself “what was this book really about?” There is indeed a “Godot-ish” feeling of events flowing by but without a clear story arc. It is an account of people and places and they grow and evolve—from troubled youth in the ‘80s to gentrifying middle age decades later, and that story is both Trevor’s and Oakland’s. Tough-looking biker dudes in black jeans and leather discussing philosophy and doting over their angelic daughters as they run around Trevor’s back yard at his son’s 2nd birthday party. Yet, in the closing discussion of the Occupy Oakland movement of 2011, Trevor seems almost like a godparent to some younger version of himself in a new generation of angry, marginalized people who don’t quite fit within the society they are growing up in. Somehow, Abramovich captures all this, and it mostly makes sense and mostly fits together. It’s an interesting book, and one worth reading.
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