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Title: The Rolling Stone Book of the Beats: The Beat Generation and American Culture by Holly George-Warren ISBN: 0786864265 Publisher: Hyperion Pub. Date: 1999 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $27.50 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.17
Rating: 4
Summary: Wonderful Look At The "Beats" Incredible Cultural Influence
Comment: For me, this book represented both a challenge and a labor of love, for it was a real culture shock for someone who has enough life experience (and is therefore old enough) to look back some forty years to recall and appreciate, in all its too-predictable homogeneity, the suffocating conformity of America in the 1950s, and how the growth and flowering of the so-called "beat" consciousness rose to challenge the politics, economics, and social life of the contemporary society. This is indeed a definitive collection of writings, photographs, and etchings that faithfully recalls the nature of beat society. The first impressions we had were silly stereotypes offered in TV series like Dragnet, where the beats were pictured as psychopathic con men trying to fleece the general public with their esoteric jargon. But then again, how would one expect someone as conventional and strait-laced as Jack Webb to "grok" onto the nature of the beats or what they were trying to say?
Everyone who was someone in the beat movement is represented here, from poet and Citylights bookstore owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti to Allen Ginsberg, from William Burroughs to Graham Parker, from Annie Leibovitz to Hunter Thompson. And what they have to say is most revealing, both about themselves as individuals as well as for the beat movement as a whole. For this was a movement that cried out for a new and more human-oriented perspective in the midst of the dawn of the technocratic society. In many ways the writings are more meaningful and better understood in that sense, as being representative of a profoundly reactive voice howling out against the pities of modern life. And in many things, the beat movement and the accompanying humanistic-oriented ethos it developed was the nurturing force that allowed the flowering of the sixties counterculture. However, as even a cursory reading of these materials will attest, the beat movement was much more than that.
The book traces the movement through four essential stages; first, the birth and growth of the movement with the rise of poets like Allen Ginsberg and the fabled Poetry Renaissance in San Francisco as well as the emergence of beat forms of Jazz music. Then, the three major icons of the beat culture are introduced and surveyed: Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg, whose combined legacy to the beat culture and to modern popular culture are each in turn examined. This is a wonderful book, one full of singular prose and absolutely historic literary pieces. This is one you will want to own, to browse and prowl through, and to read in spurts and starts. There are a myriad of great bits contained here, all of which are cobbled together beautifully by the editors of Rolling Stone. I heartily recommend this book, one that offers the reader a delightfully real and vibrant glimpse into a brief shining moment in popular American culture, once upon a time when ordinary men and women thought and wrote and played with extraordinary thoughts and observations about the nature of life in contemporary America. Enjoy!
Rating: 5
Summary: Digging into the Beat
Comment: I found this book to be very helpful in my study of beat literature. While many people consider the beat movement to revolve around three or four very talented individuals this book shows the huge array of writers, painters, photographers, conmen, and comidians that helped to influence and form the generation. This book is not only a great read in itself, but is also a great reference tool. Long live the Beats!
Rating: 4
Summary: A great introduction to great literature
Comment: I read ON THE ROAD over the recent summer and since then i have been interested in the beat generation and their style of life. This book is a perfect introduction for me, with detailed chapters on Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs as well as other chapters on the beat generation asa whole. I haven't read it all; it's great to dip into from time to time.
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Title: Women of the Beat Generation: The Writers, Artists and Muses at the Heart of a Revolution by Brenda Knight, Anne Waldman, Ann Charters ISBN: 1573241385 Publisher: Conari Pr Pub. Date: 1998 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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