Smart and fast-paced; one of the better pieces to appear so far in this anniversary year.
On the Road, celebrating its 50th birthday, may have been composed in a white heat. But, as Kerouac scholar Maher ably shows in this biography of the book and its author, it took years for that heat to build.
Kerouac’s famed friendship with Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs dates to the mid-1940s; later in the decade he learned the word “beat” from Burroughs, who, Maher notes, learned it from writer Herbert Huncke, whom Kerouac called “the greatest storyteller I’ve ever known.” Huncke used the word as a synonym for “poor,” but Kerouac exalted, characteristically, “like sleeping in the subways, like Huncke used to do, and yet being illuminated and having illuminated ideas about apocalypse and all that.” Kerouac’s borrowing would make him, famously, the spokesman for the so-called Beat Generation a decade later, after On the Road was published in 1957. Kerouac’s epochal book, too, Maher chronicles, took shape in the late 1940s, when depressive Kerouac (“the experience of life is a regular series of deflections that finally results in a circle of despair”) and madcap generational bad influence Neal Cassady tore around the country on a few epic amphetamine- and beer-fueled car trips, visiting such places as Oakland, with its “most interesting skid row in America,” and Denver, where poor hive-beset polyamorous Cassady kept multiple households. The movement was constant, Cassady covering, as Maher carefully records, “4,943 miles across the country” in a single week and Kerouac’s logging more than 8,000 miles by thumb, rail and other suitably apocalyptic hobo contrivances. Publisher Robert Giroux began to court Kerouac as a prospective author in the late 1940s and publish him in 1950 as well, but, as Maher writes, “the next seven years would test [Kerouac’s] endurance as a writer harshly,” finally yielding his breakthrough book.
Smart and fast-paced; one of the better pieces to appear so far in this anniversary year.Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-56025-991-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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