Bike Week at Daytona Beach: Bad Boys and Fancy Toys

The photographs are by far the most compelling aspect of this book, which chronicles Page's own motorcycle journey to Daytona Beach for the annual Bike Week. While the photos jump off the page, the text, like a bike in need of a tune-up, takes time to get warmed up: the first chapter, which recounts Page's riding through cold weather and having his Harley break down, reads like a misfire when compared to the lively, chaotic Datyona scenes he describes in later chapters. The book focuses largely on how Bike Week has changed; the event was ""in disrepute"" during the '60s, and '70s, but Daytona, by the late '80s, made peace with the annual invasion, hanging welcome banners, for instance, beginning in 1988. Municipally blessed or not, Bike Week is swollen with bikers of all stripes-the leather-clad, facial-tattooed, beer-guzzling brawlers and the just as fearsome Christian bikers-and Page's photos capture them all, though the accompanying captions are minimally informative. Still, for motorcycle enthusiasts or those with a morbid curiosity about what really goes on at bike rallies, the book is a welcome look at what for many is an important annual pilgrimage.