by Bill Morgan ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 9, 2006
A superb, highly readable addition to the history of 20th-century American letters.
Allen Ginsberg, gay beatnik/hippie antinomian poet nomad—and American hero?
Morgan, Ginsberg’s longtime bibliographer and archivist, responsible for the sale of Ginsberg’s papers to Stanford University and thus for Ginsberg’s relative comfort in his last, dying days, is also an excellent writer and storyteller. His massive life of the poet turns out to be flawed only by its brevity. The year 1994 gets five pages, for instance; in that year, Ginsberg taught college, studied Buddhism, wrote, gave and hosted readings, starred in a Gap ad campaign to fund the Naropa Institute, released a four-CD box set of musical compositions and hung out in San Francisco and Paris, all the while nursing a bad heart. Morgan situates Ginsberg’s life in a Jewish radical tradition, in an ethnic ethic of hard work, learning and resistance to authority; sadly, Ginsberg’s corner of the shtetl was also visited by mental illness, his mother institutionalized, as the poet himself would be. A nice boy of academic gifts and even genius, Ginsberg fell into the wrong crowd on entering college, with the likes of Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs and Lucien Carr; for his troubles, he would be constantly broke, be expelled from Columbia, be jailed, be hospitalized—and also be liberated to write such epochal poems as Howl and Kaddish, which, half a century on, are regarded as nearly canonical. In the great spirit of honor among thieves, Ginsberg remained poor and free for most of his life, doing very much as he wanted (as evidenced, among other things, by being treated for STDs many, many times). Some of the bits of news that float out of Morgan’s lyrical narrative: Ginsberg was one of the earliest experimenters with LSD. He traveled everywhere and knew everyone. He suffered from stage fright. He was fearless and selfless—hence the hero rubric. Oh, and Jack Kerouac never had a driver’s license.
A superb, highly readable addition to the history of 20th-century American letters.Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2006
ISBN: 0-670-03796-6
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2006
Share your opinion of this book
More by Allen Ginsberg
BOOK REVIEW
by Allen Ginsberg edited by Bill Morgan
BOOK REVIEW
by Lawrence Ferlinghetti & Allen Ginsberg ; edited by Bill Morgan
BOOK REVIEW
by William S. Burroughs edited by Bill Morgan
by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
Awards & Accolades
Likes
21
Our Verdict
GET IT
Kirkus Reviews'
Best Books Of 2015
Kirkus Prize
winner
New York Times Bestseller
IndieBound Bestseller
National Book Award Winner
Pulitzer Prize Finalist
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
Share your opinion of this book
More by Ta-Nehisi Coates
BOOK REVIEW
by Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
More About This Book
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Share your opinion of this book
More by Elie Wiesel
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.