Burroughs Books

In some ways, I feel that I have learnt much more in my review during the past few days, than what I have learnt in class.

Had I covered the whole book, yes, a 5 would have been expected.

I took AP Biology last year as a junior with a teacher who had never before taught an AP class. It was difficult to keep on schedule with the material in class. In fact, my class did not even finish studying animal anatomy and physiology. Despite this, I still got a five on the test. Now don't get me wrong, this guide would probably be extremely difficult to make sense of with no textbook, but this book really helped me get my facts straight and rush through the key parts that my class omitted. I cannot compare it with other study guides out there, but I think that this is the only study guide I have ever used that really had an affect on my grades in class, and on my final AP test.

Good luck, and down with the evil college board!

After I finished reading Literary Outlaw, by Ted Morgan, I was so fascinated that I read all of Burroughs' novels, and several books by Kerouac and Ginsberg. I also read two more Burroughs biographies, just to get more information on this weird old guy.

Literary Outlaw is just that good.

There are newer biographies of Burroughs by Barry Miles and also Graham Caveney. Nevertheless, Literary Outlaw remains the definitive Burroughs biography written to date.

This is a fascinating biography that reads like a pageturning novel. Burroughs grew up in a privileged St. Louis family, spent some time at a rough ranch-style boarding school in New Mexico, attended Harvard, travelled in Europe, and lived in New York, Mexico, New Orleans, Texas, Tangier, London, New York (again), and finally Kansas. Along the way he became the most scandalous figure in modern letters. His adventures and misadventures are related in this marvelous book.

Literary Outlaw is more exhaustive than either Caveney's or Miles' biographies. Chapters with titles like "Tangier: 1954-1958" and "The London Years: 1966-1973" make for easy navigation. As the book's coverage ends in 1988, there is no information on Burroughs' life in the 1990s, but the essays in the book Word Virus (by James Grauerholz) act as a good supplement, for biographical information.

Morgan did a good job. He wrote a page-turning biography, but not at the expense of Burroughs' literary reputation. Burroughs' value as a writer is challenged throughout, and it holds up. Biographical detail is linked to popular criticism of the texts. There is an extensive section of notes. There is an index.

You can't go wrong with this biography. If you've never read a biography of William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, or Allen Ginsberg, I advise you to try Literary Outlaw. This book is very well written, and is probably the most fascinating biography I have ever read.

ken32

If this book failed in being an intellectual biography, it certainly succeeded in portraying the world of William Burroughs in an interesting fashion. Burroughs life seems for the most part
a series of tragedies. It appears as though he was molested as a youth and one is tempted - perhaps due to the saturation of "pop psychology" in our day- to conclude that somehow his future misfortunes (and brilliance) were rooted in that event. Subsequently driven from the United States, then Mexico (where he committed the infamous "William Tell" fatal shooing of his wife) he spends the greater part of his life wandering between Tangiers, Paris, London and New York. Oddly enough, he only seems to find some kind ofhappiness at the end of his life in Lawrence, Kansas.

His meeting with the other members of the "Beat Movement", Allen Ginsburg, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, seemed fated, and unlike the others he did not become a "Beat Stereotype but remained authentically himself, behaving in many ways like a conservative midwesterner. Perhaps this authenticity is what appealed to his groupies who could not manage to retain their own identity separate from the various trends in which they participated.

Whether I will find anything intellectually stimulating in the works of Burroughs remains to be seen. Despite his many shortcoming, he was a key cultural force in undermining the foundation of the narrow, cocktail sipping, coutnry club 50s generation.

I won't be as descriptive and detailed (there we go) on this review as on THE Wild Boys. This too is a good book, but my least favorite of my collection. It also seems to be the shortest, and less memorable. Parts of it seem to be more preachy than other releases, opening with Agent Lee talking about how the mass media is controlled by psuedo-punk poseurs addicted to controlling the brainwashed populace. From what I remember, Burroughs seems to make fun of these individuals (who have such elaborate names as Jimmy The Butcher, Jackie Blue Note, etc.) who are portrayed as racist punks fooling everyone with actually being the enemy of true revolutionaries. The plans they hatch up to keep the world controlled are amusing.

Aside from this most coherent of writing, the rest is pure Burroughs insanity...classics include the section "Twilight's Last Gleeming", in which a ship is going down and all hell is breaking loose (the immortal line quoted above is said by the drag-wearing captain of that ship). This may come as a shock, but some of the sections actuall bored me...mainly the more scientific information packed parts like the relationship between parasites and hosts, other easily forgettable things. But look past this, and Burroughs knows what he's talking about.

As before, there are some downright beauties and truths around...this may have been from one of the other books since they all seem to flow together as a whole, but I remember a story about a house shifting over a dsert plain and the tenants trying to socialize with lonely lemurs hanging in a tree. There's a great peice of poetry existing right around there. about angry warriors waitng around with their arrows loking for someone to shoot. It just proves that WSB would've been good at straitforward poetry, possibly better than Allen Ginsburg. He actually tried it with Tom Waits on The Black Rider album, remind myself I gotta get that. Wancha all stripped down, all stripped down....wrong album. Point blank, this book is just as worthy/signifigant/brown propeller on a fasion moon as any of his others. Dig? Flat, baby. Flatfooted and pure goulash on my headset tonight. Burroughs, my man...you know it...you...

Fadeout in classic form.

Some of Burroughs' incisiveness may derive from his usage of the famous cut-up and fold-in techniques (using passages plagiarized / "sampled" from other texts, including psychology journals, newspapers, pulp science fiction and true crime texts, and literary sources like T. S. Eliot and Rimbaud) - when he uses these, he gets at a radical (if illogical) analysis of the source texts. The illogical / nonlinear structure that results might throw some, but to my mind, this fits in perfectly with the book's overall critique - if you believe that certain forms of language (and thought) are politically corrupted, as Burroughs does, then the answer may be to compose a text that exists outside of those structures. The result feels vital and exciting - it is practically a new way of thinking on the page - and Burroughs' ideas on how to resist and defeat "the machine" and the nova process are similarly thought-provoking and unexpected (they bring to light a spiritual (monastic) side of Burroughs that I hadn't been previously familiar with).

"The Job" is often brutal, always controversial, and possessed by the author's inimitable knack for nailing his target. This is an unforgettable plunge into one of the 20th century's foremost countercultural intellects.

From the very first part of Tarzan of the Apes, the story is presented as entirely plausable. ERB's outdoorsmanship combines well with his historical knowledge.

One of the funniest pictures he paints in the first book is his lurking over a pair of old Boston Scholars in the jungles, keeping them alive by thwarting various hungry critters while they obliviously discuss the fall of the Islamic Calliphate in Iberia circa 1492, and it's effects on the Rainaissance...

ERB's sense of Honour, Duty and Loyalty shine through, and this novel succeeds in teaching the those values, what they mean and why the are important as only one other book I've read (StarshipTroopers, Heinlein).

IMHO, ERB's first two volumes of Tarzan should be required reading.

Writer at BellaOnline

I still vividly recall the cover of Tarzan and the Ant Men, a book which I read and reread in around 5th or 6th grade. It was one of those cheesy 50 cent paperbacks (now they would cost you at least $5.99) and it featured the Lord of the Jungle surrounded by spear wielding pygmies, It was just so ripe with the promise of adventure that, to this day, I can not imagine a human being gazing upon its glory and not being consumed by a desire to read the book. And once you read one, you were faced with a plethora of riches. There are 26 Tarzan novels and myriad movies; plus there was an excellent comic book version and a Saturday morning cartoon at that point. Then there were Burroughs's other series, my particular favorites being the Pellucidar books and John Carter, Warlord of Mars. You could practically read nothing but Burroughs and go for years before having to start rereading stuff. But, of course, the great thing about getting a kid hooked on reading is that one author leads to another. Soon I was mowing down Jules Verne books (see review of Around the World in Eighty Days) and the adventures of Doc Savage, The Avenger, The Shadow, The Lone Ranger, etc., not to mention Tolkein and C.S. Lewis (see review of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe).

So imagine my pleasure when I found this old Ballantine Books paperback of Tarzan of the Apes, with a cover by Neal Adams showing an enraged Tarzan racing towards a screeching great ape who is grasping a seductively disheveled Jane by her flowing blonde locks. It's amazing, you haven't read a word yet and already your pulse is racing. Then open the book and, wonder of wonders, it's every bit as thrilling and wonderful as I remembered it. Shipwrecks, mutinies, buried treasure, lion attacks, hostile tribesmen, and most of all the ape pack and the herculean efforts of one lost little boy to survive in the forbidding wilds of Africa--what more could a reader want in a book?

Tarzan is one of a small group of fictional characters--the others being Frankenstein, Dracula and Sherlock Holmes--created in the last 200 years who have acquired lives of their own, far outlasting their creators to be constantly reprised and reimagined. If we examine this quartet, they are united by one central theme; each represents man's desire to in some way control nature. Frankenstein is, of course, an expression of our aspiration towards godhood (see Orrin's review), the dream of creating life. Dracula expresses the desire to escape death and achieve immortality. Holmes embodies our hope that pure reason will yield the solutions to life's mysteries. And Tarzan, in all his Darwinian glory, is an assertion of the inevitability that it would be man who rose to the top of the evolutionary totem pole. Each, thus, strikes a chord deep in our being. But what makes them transcendent and fascinating, generation after generation, is the element of uncertainty that each contains. Frankenstein is obviously an experiment run amok. Dracula's immortality comes at an unbearable price. Holmes's hyper-rational mind requires the stimulation of drugs to battle boredom. And Tarzan is trapped uneasily between the civilized and the savage worlds. In this context he implicates two issues, one obvious--man's control over nature, the other less so--the effect of civilization on mankind.

As to the first issue, I was pleasantly surprised at the recent Disney version of Tarzan. In light of films like Pocahontas and Lion King, I just expected it to be politically correct pabulum. That implicit message of Tarzan--that man naturally and rightfully rules nature, disposing of its bounty at his will--is so anathema to the environmentalist hegemony of our times that you sort of had to assume that Disney would eviscerate the story. They did alter it substantially, particularly by not having Tarzan fight Kerchak to become leader of the ape pack, but they left enough of the basic tale intact to satisfy all but the most fanatic ERBites. And, at the end of the day, you can argue about the propriety of man controlling the environment and exploiting nature, but it is pretty hard to argue against the power of Burrough's metaphorical image of the youthful human Tarzan becoming the Lord of the Jungle. Simply taken as a cultural symbol, Tarzan is fascinating, a modern myth comparable to any ancient one.

On the second issue, Tarzan's unique upbringing and his very role as the hero of these books along with the helplessness displayed by "civilized" whites when they enter the jungle, raises the question of whether civilization is simply a veneer which we could drop if necessary (as London implies in Call of the Wild [see review] and The Sea Wolf [see review]) or whether civilization strips away something primal and valuable in our natures. In a famous essay on the Tarzan books, Gore Vidal asserts that:

a good many people find their lives so unsatisfactory that they go right on year after year telling themselves stories in which they are able to dominate their environment in a way that is not possible in this overorganized society

His snitty point is about domination and what losers the readers of these books must be (of course, he more than likely spent his closeted youth reading Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and look how he turned out), but it is the "overorganized society" part of this comment that is the most interesting, obliquely pointing out the subtext of the weakening influence of modern society on mankind. If we accept Darwin's theory of survival of the fittest--which we will for the sake of this discussion--then what happens when the threats to our survival are removed, or at the very least reduced? Tarzan suggests the possibility that the pressures of the fight for survival forge a stronger man than the advances of modern civilization can hope to compete with.

It is with this perspective that we can perceive the irony that Tarzan--the son of an English Lord, raised in Africa--is the quintessential American hero. Embodying the elements of rugged individualism and self-reliance, he is an archetype in the tradition of Natty Bumpo. It is no surprise then that this series of books is probably the most successful and popular in all of American Literature.

But enough analysis. The important thing about these books is that they are genuinely exciting and are enormous fun to read.

GRADE: A+

Black Roots borders on over-kill; so, readers who shy away from intensity may not get beyond the first twenty-five pages. Mr. Burroughs states that his book is limited in scope, yet he leaves no stone unturned. His dictate for scientific methodology, discipline and tenacity throughout, may be somewhat intimidating to the faint hearted new researcher who thinks genealogy is "merely a hobby". Although he shares plenty of motivational lifts such as "Have fun and Don't give up", some may not see any amusement in the phrase,"the study of..." On the other hand, it would be difficult not to be trapped by Mr. Burroughs' fire and passion for the study of...genealogy.