Jack Kerouac Books

What an idiot! Makes no sense.

Dr. Lardas' grounding of the early Beats' intellectual program in their communal reading of Oswald Spengler's _Decline of the West_ is an unusually substantive contribution to the field. Too often, monographs on the Beats are either tedious [strange] political treatises masquerading as literary history, or hagiographies of Kerouac's youthful wanderlust, neither of which category of inquiry could possibly add anything to the witness of the individual artists in question through their works. However, Lardas shows that Spengler's vision of the cyclical nature of civilization and the contemporeneity of the end of the Western European cycle led Burroughs, Kerouac and Ginsberg to look for the seeds of the next cycle in the vibrant, marginalized communities of which they were a part.

Dr. Lardas' prose style can best be described as "sparkling ramble". The energy of his ideas, bursting with the Mediterranean vigor of his jacket photo, at times overwhelms the larger structure of the book that is laid upon them. Happily enough this compositional tension congrues with the subject matter.

Bless my soul jelly roll, this is not ordinary literary criticism about sources and influences but an epic drama, a hero's journey. A murderer, a schizophrenic, a male prostitute and an alcoholic read a proto-Nazi theory of everything and find personal redemption through pop culture.

But is this the final frame of reference? Every generation since has struggled to re-frame the meaning of the past day by day, and I suspect that's what this book (or its subject matter anyway) is "really" about. It's post-modern, rock-and-roll, cheese bait and cadillac fins. You be the poem.

Can't say that this really grabs me like On The Road did. I feel less like in on the action and comings and goings of the people mentioned in the novel. Admittedly this may have to do with the fact that I actually read On The Road before I purchased the audio book and I only read part of The Dharma Bums, before getting the audio book. The person who narrates the audio book seems bored and listless.

Less plot, more pot than On the Road. Where Kerouac's most famous novel was all about reckless travel, music, girls, and rebellion, Dharma Bums is more introspective. Lots of meditation, soul searching and existential ruminations about life, truth, and nature. My only regret is that I didn't choose the book format, as it was hard to keep up with all the philosophical ramblings while listening in the car.

This is a book that surfaces again and again in popular culture. Last year I saw high school students in the show "Freaks and Geeks" discuss it in their English class. In the Australian indie film "He Died with a Felafel in His Hand," the protagonist aspires to be a new Kerouac, repeating over and over how Kerouac wrote the whole book on a roll of butcher paper to avoid the artificial structure imposed by separate sheets of paper.

So I read the book; actually, I listened to the audiobook narrated by Alexander Adams (published by Books on Tape). Kerouac has some excellent turns of phrase: he loves laughter, as the protagonist (Sal) encounters a man with "a long quivering crazy laugh," one whose "tremendous laugh roared over the California woods," one whose "laugh was maniacal," and yet another whose "laugh...was positively and finally the one greatest laugh in all this world." And Kerouac tells some great stories.

But the book was frustratingly uneven. Sometimes the stories are really interesting, and other times they drag on and on, with exhaustingly unchecked hedonism and lack of purpose. Note that the book is also pretty gritty, with lots of alcohol and drug use, and several depressing sexual encounters. A friend asked me to compare the book with Steinbeck's Travels with Charlie: no comparison; there is a reason Steinbeck won a Nobel Prize. But the other fundamental difference is that Steinbeck traveled with purpose (to get back in touch with America), while Sal travels with no purpose but to "go, go, go."

Before there were Hippies or Yuppies, it was hip to be "Beat".The generation of writers, poets, artists, and musicians living Bohemian lifestyles, yearning for knowledge,and enjoying life to it's fullest.

"On The Road",a novel based on Kerouac's own travels, follows the adventures of the life loving Sal Paradise and the complex Dean Moriarity as they criss-cross North America, usually broke, trying to find themselves. They experience life, and lifestyles new to them and savor every moment. Every colorful character they encounter touches their lives in some way, and adds greatly to this story. Kerouac's zest for life and love of people becomes apparent and is contagious.His wonderful descriptive phrases leave you with fabulous images of the people, the places, and the times.I often found myself smiling or even laughing out loud.

It's a story that captures and preserves on it's pages the essence of the "beat generation" and is so engrossing, you may lose track of all time. And for those that love Kerouac's words and can't get enough,you can take him with you! This book is also available on an unabridged CD -On The Road CD or cassette-On The Road audio editions. With a reading that will give you an even deeper appreciation of these wonderful characters,one that brings them to life, actor Matt Dillon,captures every delicious moment as if he was Kerouac himself.For details on the audio editions - see my reviews.

With every read, I have a great time, and wish I was there!

"What's your road, man?"....enjoy...Laurie

This is a lovingly read book. David does a fine job, and this person wouldn't know it if it happened to them.

Jack Kerouac's On the Road is a work of delightful honesty; he's everyman heading out on the road. David Carradine's reading of it on the Audiobook version is boring in the extreme and will only make you wonder what all the fuss is about. Carradine should have stuck to Kung Foo. The BBC Radio 4 Book at Bedtime reading by Toby Stephens was much more exciting and in keeping with how Kerouac would have read it himself, is there any chance of a tape of that being released?

Orpheus Emerged is set on a college campus where most of the main characters are more interested in their own reading curriculum and writing their own works than attending class. The main character, Paul, is not even a student, but just goes and sits in classes that interest him. The bad thing is that he's so passionate about his own self-importance that he's willing to interrupt class and badger the professor about the correctness or incorrectness of what he is teaching. Not a smart move. The characters prance around the book, spouting philosophical theories about life and God and writing bad poetry, thinking they are some sort of closet Shakespeares. Gabbing, drinking, sleeping with each others girlfriends or wives seems to be the their main pasttimes along with making cryptic comments about other characters.

This book is far from the "Lost Classic" status hyped on its back. It almost reads like Jack Kerouac fan fiction, like some 15-year-old tried to write a Kerouac imitation novel for his creative writing class. That's how bad it is. You can almost see a thin shadow of later Jack, but I would classify this work as pretty much worthless. None of the characters are memorable except Paul and even he is not fleshed out that well. The others are just names that you can never solidly picture in your mind. It's obvious that Kerouac didn't try that hard to use his imagination to give the work more art so it comes off almost as a diary instead of a novel. Or maybe at this point, Jack wasn't even capable of doing better than this. In his best works, the yearnings and conflicts of his characters were better defined and more easily identified with. All the characters of Orpheus Emerged come off as pretentious jerks you would definitely steer away from in real life. Should only be read as a very minor footnote to Kerouac's major works.

I've heard it said by a writer that she `writes out' all her ego & mind junk in pages of burnable crap before sitting down to attempt a real book. I think this also applies to beginning a life as a writer. This novella is the product of such mind junk which should have been treated as such & burned at completion. Unfortunately for Kerouac it wasn't & if he's not blissfully unaware of it being flogged on the public market I'm sure he's squirming in his Golden Eternity as people read this laughable pretentious little book. But to be fair, he was only 23 when he wrote it & I'd give him points for at least structuring words into a story. The writing is awkward & uncomfortable; the characters affected, witless & embarrassing espousing pompous philosophies that make little sense; their movements & expressions unnatural; the plot transparent from the beginning. In a way all this makes for a very entertaining read. I could see it in my minds eye as a really bad movie played out by B grade actors. Fortunately Kerouac learnt from his mistakes & removed all these flaws from his later writing.

The Digital version is worth having. The story is the same but the medium is interesting; in fact one of the most interesting digital books I've seen. Each page is laid out differently, often with varied fonts & background pictures & includes hyperlinks to information about the books his characters pretentiously refer to. It's quite entertaining to read. It includes a fun interactive timeline & biographical bits & pieces about him & the beats. A let down was the fact that the multimedia hyperlinks promising audio & video of Kerouac via the internet led to dead pages.
Can the digital CD save the book? It depends on what you value. If you're looking for a good Kerouac story or looking to find your first book by the man, forget it. If you're aiming at completing your Kerouac collection, & filling out the `missing years', then it's a must. It'll make you feel better as a budding writer too. As Robert Creeley said in his introduction, "There will never be a moment like this one". If he means `another' moment like this one, then we can all be thankful.

A literary artefact that is intriguing as it reveals a writer at the beginning of his career, concerned with topics and issues that Kerouac would explore for the rest of his life. Although not in the familiar `spontaneous prose' style and endless stream of consciousness, often taken as difficult to follow and understand by some readers, this novella is written in the third person and well structured. As it is a short piece, the characters are not fleshed-out as they could be, which is really only possible in a full-length novel. That said, however, the two lead characters, Michael and Paul, are developed enough to sustain the plot. Overall, Orpheus is an absorbing tale about the nature of the artist or poet in their search for truth and purity of artistic vision.

Kerouac's Orpheus is the merging of two types of individuals, archetypes if you will: Michael is the tortured genius, with an imagination conducive to writing poetry, however, he is so serious and self absorbed, single minded, that he is incapable of being happy. A young man with a fine-tuned conscience, when he transgresses, he feels tremendous guilt and wallows in self-pity. Michael's relationships with the older woman, Maureen, lacks spark, and his affaire with Maria, falls flat because Michael cannot feel true love for himself or anybody else.

Paul is Michael's opposite, a roving poet-vagabond, in love with knowledge and life. Kerouac characterizes him as a genius of love and life. Paul's actions are spontaneous, humorous and driven by a devil-may-care attitude to just about everything. One day, after an altercation with Michael, he disappears for a week, and tells his friend's that he has been "Lying on the wet grass eating only fruit", which personifies the carefree, romantic wandering poet.

Written during that early time at Columbia University, when the young Kerouac first meets Alan Ginsberg and William Burroughs, we can perceive these men in some of the characters in Orpheus: enthusiastic bohemian types, learning philosophy, writing poetry and prose, listening to Brahms and drinking copious amounts of wine.

The novel ultimately is about the artist/man in search of a genuine aesthetic vision a `new vision' and the attainment of wholeness as the artist/man - there is a merging of types, and the success of this goal is the attainment of `wholeness plus vision' the `ideal' of the true artist.

This novella was by no means a disappointment, because, although a young work, Kerouac and his life long concerns are all included here.

Recommended to all Kerouac readers and students.

Sadly, it's been over a year since I read any Kerouac. Whenever I walk into a new library or used book store I judge them on how much Kerouac they carry. This tells me how intelligent they are. If there is a boatload of Kerouac on the shelves, every novel they could possibly have ordered, I know the people running the show know what is going on. If there are a few random books on the shelf, for instance, one copy of Good Blonde and one copy of On the Road, I know they are bordering on clueless.

The latter would be why I picked up this book, which is no reflection on the book, but to be honest I may not have chosen this one if they had some others I was itching for on the shelves. There were about three to chose from, and this is what I brought home.

"Orpheus Emerged" was written when he was in college, having just met some of his closest friends and starting to really discover himself and the art/music/words that surrounded him. It has the same undertones as his other books...fast paced dialogue, incoherent interactions at parties, hard pressed obsession towards poetry and its territory.

Although the women pose as ornaments, just as in his other novels, they seem to take on more importance in the way of having effect on the men they are involved with and the lives they are a part of. You don't learn much about them, as usual, but their effects are easily outlined.

I hesitate to say that Jack would fall short of much but this book might be one of the few examples of a lack of prose. The dialogue is purely colloquial while the story has more premeditation than would otherwise be expected. It's a short, enjoyable read and it is fun to see the beginning of his progress. I would say this book is more for someone who has already declared their love, rather than a first time reader. You can sense the potential in it, like the foundation for what is to come.

"Those books!", a character named Paul exclaims, "If only I had time to read them, and more. This morning, after I lost my job, I went to the University Library itself, and do you know, there were hundreds of thousands of books there I honestly felt I should read! And the ideas that rush through my mind. The impatience I feel! The time running off like sand. Ah...."

Yeah, Paul....I know what you mean. My thoughts, on paper, written by the genius himself. When his talent was just a seed planted in the soil of this novella.

"Orpheus Emerged" is, like the bulk of Jack Kerouac's work, about a bunch of "bohemians" getting really trashed all the time
and beating the hell out of each other to prove how passionate they are. The other reviewers who claim that Jack Kerouac advanced somehow or became a better writer are simply wrong. "Orpheus Emerged" is all one needs to read to understand Jack's ever present "on the edge" mentality. And I found it enjoyable. One character (we might as well call him Burroughs, since that's who he was) stands out among this seriously jaded crowd of people as the only one with guts enough to adhere to his somewhat loopy and wild notions of life. He constantly quotes Rimbaud among the most dismal scenes, which I found inspiring and pretentious at the same time. The women in Kerouac's works are exceptionally strong and, paradoxically put up with the worst kind of men imaginable. This is exhilarating in the same way as "Fight Club" is exhilarating: so over the top and doe eyed rebellious that one has to love it. Anyone who doesn't wax nostalgic while reading this never had a good time. Kick back, get your beret and black coffee, and crack it open.

JACK KEROUAC'S AMERICAN JOURNEY: THE REAL-LIFE ODYSSEY OF 'ON THE ROAD' is a 'must' for any library including Kerouac's fiction. It celebrates the 50th anniversary of ON THE ROAD and provides a biography of the book and its popularity, considering Kerouac's objectives, style, and influence and following his travels throughout the U.S. between 1947 and 1951. In providing a survey of the real people and experiences which helped shape ON THE ROAD, this offers many important keys to understanding and will prove an essential acquisition for high school to public libraries featuring Kerouac's works.

What map did Kerouac use to plan On the Road? See how the Beat Generation viewed America. Read Maher's book to learn the real story.

Maher traces the victories and vicissitudes of Kerouac's peripatetic life during the late l940's through 1951, charting along the way the evolution of Kerouac's aesthetic sensibility, highlighting, in particular, the contribution of Neal Cassady whose fragmented writings inspired and informed Kerouac to a greater degree than the work of other fellow travelers. Cassady's free-flowing and playful prose style was a revelation to Kerouac and moved him toward development of the theory of "spontaneous prose."
Maher concludes with the year l951 when 29 year old Kerouac wrote the "scroll version" of ON THE ROAD. The book written in three weeks, but, as noted, at least four previous versions of the book were written by Kerouac and the themes incorparated in the published work germinated for years in Kerouac's mind. "Live like a hobo and work like a dog," Kerouac advised would-be writers, and for much of his life lived by his adage. The l957 ON THE ROAD was as much draft of an older work as spontaneous composition. Kerouac had been rehearsing, you might say, for years, previous to the three week writing session.
The story of the writing of ON THE ROAD is a familiar one, told in Tim Hunt's KEROUAC'S CROOKED ROAD and elsewhere, but Maher adds to the tale through judicious use of Kerouac's journals and letters. A usage that moves readers closer to the inner workings of Kerouac's mind as he plotted his way. with dogged perseverance, to the creation of an american classic.
Though the prose is stilted and occasionally marred by awkward phrasing, Maher knows his subject and creates a compelling narrative, weaving strands of Kerouac's life and work to the greater social and cultural history of the post-WWII era.
Maher's KEROUAC, The Definitive Biography (2004) was a solid contribution to the body of Kerouac studies. The latest book is decent synthesis of a vital period in the life of a writer finally being given due recognition.
Wayne F. Burke, Montpelier, VT

Does no one proof-read books anymore??? Whether the author or agent or a close friend or....Come on, Mr. Maher, anyone in-the-know who knows the skinny on the Fifties is hip to the facts that James Dean did NOT play Nick Ray in "Rebel" but that, in fact, Nick Ray directed Dean as Jim Stark in that film...and who in Creation does not know that it is Ian Fleming and NOT Alan Fleming who wrote "From Russia With Love" and was the creator of James Bond??? And Brando's "Sayonara" does NOT deal with Korea but rather with post-war Japan....and that all three flicks mentioned in the book's early-on Chapter One subheading "The 1940s" came out in the '50s: "The Wild One" "Blackboard Jungle" and "Rebel Without a Cause"...yet the misperception that these films were spawned in the mid-forties in thusly created. These are NOT trifling matters because if the author and his proof-readers and the noteworthy reviewers with their "noteworthy" blurbs on the book's back aren't catching these gaffs....then how many more riddle the pages of this book? (In one other instance Burroughs is spelled Borroughs in the same paragraph! Speed typing a la Kerouac with no revisions perhaps???) And this story - a great story of a great author's great creation and how he did it - has been covered in complete bios of Kerouac far better than here....and even the introductory essays in the recent ON THE ROAD - THE ORIGINAL SCROLL are more compelling than this tired recounting. Anyway, as Jack Webb said "Just the facts...." and the facts in this trifling book are skewered, therefore troubling. I love to read just about anything on Kerouac and his times...but the errors listed above make me wonder just how well Paul Maher Jr. knows the times of which he writes. Adios, king.

Paul Maher Jr.'s previous book on Jack Kerouac, while hardly the "definitive" biography that its book jacket proclaimed, was still an impressive and scholarly accomplishment. It was the first biography of Kerouac I read, and while I've since read several more, Maher's book holds up pretty well.

So what the hell happened with this new book?

"Jack Kerouac's American Journey," published in time to coincide with the 50th Anniversary of the publication of "On the Road," is as sloppy as his previous book was precise. It is atrociously written and filled with poor proofreading and errors of fact. In addition, unless you're already familiar with Kerouac's life, a lot of the book isn't going to make sense since there's a lot that Maher just doesn't bother to explain. And given that many of his citations are in MLA format, one has to wonder whether or not this was an academic paper or some kind of thesis plumped up to meet a deadline and capitalize on the novel's anniversary.

Let me give just some of the errors of fact in the book (I didn't start noting them until I was more than halfway through the text):

p. 111: Kerouac never studied at the New School with "dramatist Eugene O'Neill" for the very simple reason that O'Neill never taught at the New School or anywhere else. The professor in question was O'Neill's son, the gifted and troubled classicist Eugene O'Neill Jr., who would take his own life only two years later. To be fair, Gerald Nicosia in his Kerouac biography "Memory Babe" makes the same mistake. I don't know of any Kerouac biographer who gets this right.

p. 139: Charles Chaplin was not "arrested with actress Joan Barry." He was indicted by a Federal Grand Jury. Barry was not charged with anything.

p. 155 "to resume classes at New School" Unless it's written in Russian, this is ungrammatical. It should be The New School, and the full title of the school should be used: The New School for Social Research (it's now referred to as New School University).

p. 200: "at his mother's new apartment in Richmond Hill, Long Island." This is a common mistake. Richmond Hill is not on Long Island, it's in the borough of Queens. It's like saying that someone lives in Mexico City, North America.

p. 208: "the moody broodings of Miles Davis" Unless this is a conscious nod to James Joyce's "Ulysses" (in which, on page 9 of the Random House edition, Buck Mulligan implores Stephen Dedalus to "Give up the moody brooding"), this is just bad writing.

p. 263: "The little fissure split into a widened gap." Writing doesn't get much worse than this.

p. 272: "Dean's portrayal of the troubled Nick Ray" This has been commented on by others. James Dean played Jim Stark in "Rebel Without a Cause." Nicholas Ray was the director of the film.

p. 273: This has been noted as well. Ian, not Alan, Fleming wrote the James Bond novel "From Russia With Love."

p. 277: I've always heard that Orville Prescott, not Charles Poore, was the regular book reviewer for the Times at that time, and that he was on vacation at the time of On the Road's publication, thus leaving Gilbert Milstein to write his now-infamous review.

Given all these mistakes and poor writing, there's really no reason for anyone to read this book. Try one of the many Kerouac biographies (even Maher's own) and just look at the chapters for the years 1947-1951 and you'll do a lot better than this.

This book features a great collection of photographs
documenting Kerouac and his circle of acquitances
spanning an impressive length of time. I would have liked
the author to have spent a little bit more time
exploring Kerouac's spiritual side, as oppossed to the media
orientated recitation of random incidents, but I
understand for it is the latter which pushes book exposure
and sales. Still, it was a book which I would encourage
others to read.

This book offers more unique photos of Kerouac and associates than any other Kerouac book, including "Angel-Headed Hipster." But the same problems with most Kerouac biographies are present in this one as well. The biographer, David Sandison, seems more intrigued by Kerouac's image rather than his substance. Of course, this is why he painstakingly gathered the photos and presented them here. As usual, Kerouac's true motivations and inner demons are given only passing references, in favor of the more cinematic qualities of his life, eg. the women, the booze, and the fast cars. This book is not for the critical Kerouac reader seeking literary insight. It is, instead, for those enamored with the Kerouac Legend.

If you truly want to get personal with Kerouac, pick up anything with Ann Charters' name on it. She has proven, by far, to be the world's most authoritative and compelling Kerouac scholar.

Most of the photos used in this illustration were never shown before in any other bio of Jack. One can tell that this was a labor of love.

While I am a gret fan of Kerouac, this book confirms my overall sentiments, those being that while a tremendous talent and personality, much like JFK, Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, and others, he wasn't nearly as good as we now make him out to be. I know this sounds horrible, but from a very objective point of view, the best thing that happen to Princess Di from a strictly PR perspective is that she died a premature and tragic death. This event increased her stock and shaped with kindness how she is being remembered. Back to the book, it is a worthwhile read and I enjoyed the 100+ photos I had not seen previously. Overall, I'd say the book was well written and worth the readers time.

The only good writing in this book is Carolyn Cassady's introduction. Most of these photos have appeared before. The editing is odd in that there are dozens of good photos of Kerouac that are only 1x1" and several full page photos of city scenes with no Kerouac content whatsovever. The text is lame. For those who want to complete their Kerouac reference librarys no matter the quality of the product.

This book isn't worth the money unless you absolutely must have everything Kerouac ever wrote. It's only got about 40 pages of poems, and if that's not bad enough, most all of the poems are published in other books.

"San Francisco Blues: Two Choruses," "Orizaba Blues: Four Choruses," and "Orlando Blues: 31st Chorus" can all be found in their entirety in Book of Blues, which is highly recommended if only because it contains the excellent "San Francisco Blues." "MacDougal Street Blues" and "My Gang" are in the wonderful & inconsistent collection Pomes All Sizes. The "Poems for Don Allen's Anthology" are choruses from "Mexico City Blues," chosen for Don Allen's anthology by Allen Ginsberg. The 20 pages of letters by Kerouac to Don Allen, while interesting, presumably can be found in Kerouac's Collected Letters. The letters also contain a "Biographical Resume" and "Biography" written by Kerouac (included in other books, I think--Good Blonde?), his statement on poetics and poetry found in Don Allen's anthology, and "Belief & Technique for Modern Prose: List of Essentials" found in the Beat Reader and Good Blonde.

So, what does that leave? Not much. The only things I'm pretty sure can't be found anywhere else are the 1958 poems "A TV Poem" and "Heaven," totaling 10 pages, as well as a one-page cartoon entitled "Doctor Sax and the Deception of the Sea Shroud" drawn at Neal Cassady's house circa 1953-54. And the two poems aren't even that good. However, "Heaven" is very interesting in that it marks a clear shift between Kerouac's Buddhist period and his later alcoholic Catholicism, and it gives us insight into Kerouac's Christian beliefs. A couple interesting quotes from "Heaven":

"The Church? Earth's dogmatic mistakes have nothing to do with Heaven"

"For we all go back where we came from, God's Lit Brain, his transcendent Eye of Wisdom / And there's your bloody circle called samsara by the ignorant Buddhists, who will still be funny Masters up there, bless em."

Oh, so now the Buddhists are ignorant? and this was written just a year or two after The Dharma Bums, wow.

So anyways, this book has a good deal of interesting stuff -- poems, letters, autobiographies, statements -- but most of it can be found elsewhere. If you don't have Book of Blues, Mexico City Blues, and Pomes All Sizes yet, don't bother with this book. But if you gotta have it all, then by all means get it.

Peace.

When I think of the beats Ginsburg, Whalen, Snyder, DiPrima, Ferlinghetti, Burroughs and Kerouac are the names that come to mind. This book pulls these and many other literary figures of the era together. For example, the title poem "Heaven" includes the lines "Phil Whalen will be / a blue cloud / anytime he wants".

The poems in this volume include poems including a series of his blues poems - San Francisco Blues; MacDougal Street Blues; Orizaba Blues; Orlando Blues - and a letter on his theory of jazz poetry. It includes two short autobiographies and a series of letters between Kerouac and a publisher.

The latter gives real insight into his writing: "I would like everybody in the world to tell his full life confession and tell it HIS OWN WAY" from a letter; or his essentials for modern prose which includes "telling the true story of the world in interior monologue" and " remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition".

The poems themselves show an interesting mixture of Catholic childhood, exposure to Buddhism, and an "in your face" telling it like it is. They are very much a product of their time which don't survive time well except as icons of their time - and some interesting seeds for era-specific equivalents for our time.

I highly recommend the book as a reminder of the beats and what they stood for (and against).

This is one of the worst works of scholarship I have ever read. The book consists mostly of plot summaries, badly written ones at that. Jones needs to re-read (read?) The Elements of Style.

As for the theory--whew! It's awful. Jones attempts to provide a Freudian reading, which would be fine if he'd bothered to understand Freud first. But he didn't. In the Works Cited, he lists only a couple works by Freud, and I believe that's because that's all he read.

Jones shows no understanding of Freud. He seems to argue that Kerouac read about Freud's theory of the Oedipus complex and then consciously tried to organize his novels around that theory. Of course that's ridiculous, but Jones seems to have no clue that the complex operates unconsciously. It's absurd to argue that Kerouac chose to apply it.

It's transparent that Jones doesn't believe the very Freudian theories he (superficially) presents. Generally, he avoids referring to psychoanalysis at all, focusing instead on plot summary and occasionally popping in to point out hostility to a father figure, etc. The theory is NEVER discussed in depth, just referred to in an offhand fashion.

Jones often claims that Kerouac's novels were modelled on the works of other writers, but he offers no support for these claims. He seems to believe that pointing out parallels constitutes evidence.

This writer is in over his depth.

This book is among the first to finally piece together a coherent path in Kerouac studies. Jones's book thoroughly delves into Kerouac's Proustian-like epic approach to the Duluoz legend. It is so refreshing to emerge with fresh ideas apropos Kerouac's technique verses the over zealous biographers and cultural blow-hards who pipe in regularly on the Beats. Much of Kerouac's real life had little to do with Beat ethos, and much more with that of the writer. What the author provides is much more than a run-down of the authobiographical mystique that Kerouac injected into his work, but moreso, the complexity of a narrative that turned American literature on its end. This book deserves much more attention and suffices itself as the most import and vital accomplishment in Kerouac studies to date. It will far outlive much of what has been written about one of America''s most misunderstood novelists.

[...]. But then I also suggest getting a subscription to the National Enquirer, for the same rhetoric to be found in that rag is to be found in this book's overtly slanted viewpoint. Every luminary in this significant literary and cultural movement is depicted as psychotic, criminal, racist, and sexually confused. Nothing positive about the Beat Generation is mentioned. Granted, the Beats had their personal faults, but who doesn't? Campbell does a great disservice to his readers by not presenting a balanced perspective of the Beats and the influence they have had around the world. If you're looking for fair, introspective commentary on the Beat Generation...look elsewhere.

I started reading this book with little prior knowledge of the beat movement and authors. I also didn't expect much from the book, thinking that it would probably be a rather academic piece of writing. And what a pleasant surprise it turned out to be! The book was so gripping that I finished it in a few days, reading long passages at a time. It covers the rise to prominence of the dramatis personae of the beat movement (focusing on Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs), giving enough information on their backgrounds to facilitate an understanding of how this influenced them and their writing, but does not dwell on unnecessary minutiae in the process. All the information is presented in a concise and remarkably readable manner. The author points out the foibles of the beats, but is not too judgemental, leaving it to the reader to come to his own conclusions.

But the best thing about this book is the way the author links events and people in a witty, intelligent way without falling into the very beat trap of being pretentious. It can serve as an example to all authors wishing to write an intelligent, accessible work of non-fiction.