A highly entertaining group biography of Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, and company that skimps on literary criticism but plumbs the Beats' dramatic lives with not-quite-prurient gusto. Anyone interested in the Beat writers will probably have encountered nearly all of the information here before; Kerouac alone seems to have inspired as many biographies as Abraham Lincoln. But by giving equal time to the three central Beats, Watson (The Harlem Renaissance, not reviewed, etc.) astutely emphasizes the interplay between their separate inspirations and the importance they attached to several ancillary figures, especially Columbia student and murderer Lucien Carr, unschooled car thief Neal Cassady, and Benzedrine addict Joan Vollmer, who married the primarily homosexual Burroughs. Kerouac's fictional portrayal of Cassady in On the Road helped to create a popular image of ``beatniks'' (in columnist Herb Caen's flip 1957 coinage) as foolish, speed-crazed menaces to the American way, but Watson shows that the Beats were bonded by enormous intellectual curiosity as well as the voracious pursuit of sex, drugs, and mystical visions. Of course, the towering disarray of Beat lives drives this rollicking saga more than the inherent qualities of Beat literature. Burroughs's heroin addiction, his South American quests for the legendary hallucinogen yage, and the botched William Tell stunt that killed his wife; Kerouac's speed-fueled writing binges and later alcoholic descent; Cassady's underworld upbringing, incessant marital infidelities, and last hurrah as the acid- dropping driver for Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters; Ginsberg's incarceration in a mental hospital and his sexual exploits with Burroughs, Kerouac, and, most sustainedly, Cassady: The brow- lifting anecdotes maintain their perverse allure. On a more critically rigorous note, Watson provides an expert map to the links between the Beats and the poets of the '50s San Francisco Renaissance. For a spirited introduction to the midcentury American literary avant-garde, curious readers could do far worse than to start here. (photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Nov. 27, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-42371-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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