A useful document for scholars of the Beat generation.
A Beat poet’s journal following the suicide of her closest friend encompasses many seasons and cycles of life and death.
For decades, di Prima (The Poetry Deal, 2014, etc.) has provided an important female perspective on a Beat generation whose best-known figures have been male. This volume, studded with beautiful moments but often scattershot, began as letters she wrote daily to dancer and Andy Warhol acolyte Freddie Herko, who leapt to his death from a window when he was 29, leaving many projects and plans unfulfilled. “I pray now that your third love came, in silver shoes, and veiled, that she glittered and danced for you, a boy-girl, a child with the secrets,” writes the author. “That you followed her out the window.” More likely, Herko’s death was caused by a combination of amphetamine-fueled desperation or insanity. “You cleaned yourself, you danced, you shed your flesh,” writes di Prima. “A leap that bought the new age and turned us loose.” With evocative detail and introspective insight, she writes of that loss and the feeling of being turned loose, occasionally unmoored, struggling to create art through years of living in barely habitable apartments. She also writes, often in a fractured manner, about how her marriage to the man who had been Herko’s partner was troubled from the start. She conceived a child with another man and ended that pregnancy with an abortion that continued to haunt her. She went to Timothy Leary’s wedding, copy edited Herbert Huncke, took LSD, wrote poems, and made plays. She saw the beatniks and their bongos give way to the hippies, “hairier than the old. They are wreathed in perpetual, goony, elaborate grins.” She fell deeply in love with other women, though most relationships seemed to be troubled, transitory, or both. “Peter took refuge downstairs, we spoke mythologies. We sniffed cocaine together, Peter buying. Peter set out for India. Returned in two months, tanned and older, moved in with me. We set out to get married, but we failed.”
A useful document for scholars of the Beat generation.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-87286-880-9
Page Count: 210
Publisher: City Lights
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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