Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #23663 in Books
• Published on: 2002-08-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 282 pages

Synopsis
Bullied at school, and growing up dreaming of revenge, Mark "Chopper" Read determined to be the toughest in any company. This autobiography tells how he became a crime commando who terrorized drug dealers, pimps, thieves and armed robbers on the streets and in jail - but he boasts never to have hurt an innocent member of the public. As a streetfighter, gunman and underworld executioner, he has been earmarked for death a hundred times but has lived to tell the tale.

Customer Reviews

The luckiest criminal to ever live
The autobiography of Mark Brandon Read ‘Chopper’ gives us a unique and seldom told insight into the criminal underworld of Australia, particularly Melbourne. The story begins by an infatuation with guns, explosives and military history crossed-wired with a young child who spent a lot of time drugged up in a psychiatric rehabilitation prison. Mix two vital ingredients together and you’re left with a dangerous man.

Probably the most sought-after criminal in Australia, Chopper acquired his enemies through his friends’ enemies and from robbing the bank robbers and other similar criminals. He’s killed plentiful, but protests “I’m no murderer…I’m a garbage disposal expert” and from a certain perspective, his tales hold a strong point of view. The only men he has claimed to kill are murderers themselves, drug dealers and rapists. Any other men he has killed may well have been innocent, but Chopper was acting purely in self-defence.

Spending most of his life behind bars, Chopper inevitably made friends with other inmates and also confronted his worst enemies. Cleverly thought out antics and plots to burn down prisons are just a range of things Chopper and friends would execute in an attempt to relieve boredom and pass time. Nevertheless he claims: - “It is a madhouse in prison – and twice as bad outside,”

Packed with hilarious non-chronological stories about imbecilic big shot gangsters; Close attempts to wipe out Chopper; And a world where criminals fear Chopper over the law; this book will keep you thoroughly entertained from start to finish.

In his own words; “You can fool some of the people all of the time, And you can even fool all of the people some of the time, but in the real world of blood and guts you don’t fool Chopper Read any of the time.”

Very Disappointing
I have read stories about Chopper read in the past and have seen his excellent movie. I was hoping that this book would tell the truth about his violent past. I wanted to read how it felt to be stabbed, beaten and have your ears cut off and about the villains he caught and what he did to them to exact his revenge. Sadly the book reads more like a "who's who" of the Australian underworld almost as if he was paying homage to his foe. The first few chapters are dedicated to telling you about his friends, but this is not what you want from an autobiography is it? You want to know about the man himself and are ultimately frustrated by the lack of information.

He refuses to talk about his childhood because "it would make grown men sick". This is very disappointing since these formative years made the man who he is and it would have given the reader an excellent insight into how a person's upbringing provides the direction they will follow for the rest of their lives.

Chopper seems like a nice bloke underneath the ultra-violent façade. On occasion he opens-up and tells you things he reckons to have never told anyone before. He certainly does not glamorise his criminal past simply because he does not tell you enough about it.

This is a very disappointing autobiography that starts well but quickly becomes tedious. I am hoping that "Chopper 2" will include the material which is sorely missed from this book.

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.