Chopper - Books (Mark Brandon Read, Paperback)

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Customer Reviews of Chopper

G. T. Brown
uk
5th March 2008

Must Read
i read autobiographies daily. this has 282 pages , before stopping for a glimpse of the clock i read over half!
I am not a big crime or criminal reader at all but this guy has got me hooked! My wallet groaned when it saw there was 10 follow ups!
but as far this book is concerned , finding out the real reason why the guy is named chopper is worth a fiver of anyones money!
a grizzly tale that gets worse , a funny tale that shouldnt be funny!
if you can get this for under a fiver youre a fool not to

rich
united kindom
29th January 2008

chopper
this book is a well diagrammed life of a man who does what others fear or can't do he was one of the most feared men in austalia and boasts about killing drug deallers and pimps ie "human filth" this book is a great portrait of his life and tells you in detail about the way he acts and how the criminal underworld is like.

Glidd of Glood
Switzerland
25th November 2006

Promises much delivers little - what did you expect from a crim?
What goes on in the mind of a professional murderer and torturer? Not much, if you are to judge from this book. And herein lies its biggest disappointment: you just don't learn a great deal of any substance from reading it. Mark "Chopper" Read, despite his efforts to convince us of his exceptional status in the Melbourne underworld as the thinking man's invincible criminal, comes over as a somewhat pathetic loser. He fails to see any irony in the fact that he exactly resembles the "human filth" of other gangsters that he has crippled or killed. He is the ultimate parasite. If crooks are the mites and nits of society, profiting from the labour of others, Read is the parasite of parasites who steals from the crims without even going to the trouble of setting up a drugs import operation. He also refers to many of his enemies as paranoid and then details the small armoury that he feels necessary to take with him to the beach in order to go swimming - failing to see how comic this is. This small anecdote already serves to underline the inherently untrustworthy nature of his narrative. Chopper would need a small truck to get all his weapons to the beach, and they would in any case serve no useful purpose in such a large quantity. The story is just another attempt at bravado and self-aggrandisement which is what this book delivers in spades.

It contains no real structure, being more a pundit's guide to the Melbourne underworld which is ultimately very dull. Read does not possess the literary skill to organise his material, nor to bring it alive through dialogue or description. He is capable of telling us in a sentence what someone did in 1979 and then in the next sentence, what they did in 1978 - chronology seems to escape him. The cast of psychos and social debris that he counts as his friends, until some terrible slight like a chance remark, a drink out of the wrong cup or a funny look, condemns them to be the next victims of his insatiable appetite for violence, are not especially interesting or well-drawn characters and are hard to differentiate. Instead of giving us real detail on his life, or any analysis, what we do get is a garbled ramble through odd events in no real sequence which ultimately tells us very little. Despite the constant boasts about the toe-cutter's métier, there is not a single description of actually cutting anyone's toes, how it is done, and what the torturer and victim feel about it. There is a photo of Chopper with "trusty chainsaw" but not a single reference to his actually using it. Maybe it was just handy for cutting logs in the winter.

What the book most recalls are the theatrical tirades and posturing of wrestlers on American wrestling programmes prior to the hopelessly fixed bouts. Chopper pours copious scorn on his rivals and enemies, but ultimately, the reader - not knowing any of them personally - just doesn't care. For a book that is purportedly about him, Read is very parsimonious with his actual doings. As an indication of just how confused it is, we don't actually know if it was written in jail, if he is still there, when he went there, how long for and when he got out, or if he did. You would have thought that such basic information would be a starting point for his story.
So what do we learn? Well, the reader will gain a sense that Chopper is almost certainly extremely violent and dangerous, so his probable principal ambition in writing the book is no doubt achieved. We can also infer that he is undoubtedly completely unhinged, with a severe personality disorder. Thus in the circumstances, the reader can't really expect a Marcel Proust level of reminiscence. Additionally, his truly pathetic attempts at poetry serve to highlight a lack of education and a dearth of literary talent.

The good news is that the police have kept him off the streets for the last 17 years and he has now apparently traded sticking biros in people's eyes for a writing career. The bad news is that he has written another six books of this drivel, but at least we don't have to read them.

Vorias
greece
23rd February 2006

thumbs down
This is a sad attempt to emulate american crime galore. The author is obviously making things up as he writes. He thinks he is some tough gangster but in reality he is probably only a great story weaver. Bad reading material. Should be categorized as pure fiction. I Miss my money spent for two of his books. I do not recommend it.

Del
London, United Kingdom
27th February 2005

A unique true crim biography
You will read no other book lik this! Gangsters, bare knuckle fighters and villains all have a somewhat simliar story to tell, but how many criminals earns their crust off other crims, and live to joke about it?? Regarded as a headhunter / standover man, Chopper Read takes much delight in recounting his stories of voilence, prison wars and moments of humour to make you laugh till you cry - even when you thinks it's wrong! Typical Aussie style black humour, this is a book you'll cetainly read more than once.