Review by Booklist Review
The Beats, that is, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Diane DiPrima, and Michael McClure, to name a core group, are finally being accorded the attention they deserve; they constituted, after all, a major, lastingly influential arts movement. Many books have weighed in, including a collection of Kerouac's letters and The Birth of the Beat Generation [BKL N 1 95]. Anthologies include the Portable Beat Reader (1992), Big Sky Mind: Buddhism and the Beat Generation [BKL S 1 95], and now Waldman's fine volume that begins with a foreword by Allen Ginsberg. The Beats were a prolific bunch and each anthology contains different works. The fact that Waldman's is of such high quality is no surprise; a poet herself, she cofounded, with Ginsberg, the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, Colorado. Beat Culture and the New America 1950^-1965 is unique among Beat books. The companion volume to a dynamic exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, it captures the energy, verve, and originality of the Beats' multimedia creative frenzy. Kerouac, Ginsberg, and company were as enamored of jazz, drawing, collage, photography, painting, performance, and film as they were of literature, and all these wild, narcotized, libidinous geniuses dabbled in the visual arts with various degrees of success. The art of the core group, as well as of a host of lesser-known but often more artistically adept fellow travelers, is well chronicled in this handsomely designed book, which also includes noteworthy manuscripts and many portraits of the artists at work and at play. The text offers fresh interpretations of the Beat mindset and aesthetics, and places the Beats within a cultural and historical context. --Donna Seaman
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
If, like editor and poet Waldman, you'd like to pretend the Beat Generation is an ``ongoing literary avant garde'' (rather than a historic phenomenon), then you might enjoy this quirky little anthology. All the major figures--Burroughs, Kerouac, Corso, Ginsberg--are represented, though in Ginsberg's case with less well-known parts of his most famous poems (e.g., part II of Howl). In a gesture to these gendered and race-conscious times, Waldman includes minor poets Lenore Kandel, Joanne Kyger, and Bob Kaufman; the biographical headnotes, meanwhile, chronicle friendships, and illustrates the mutual admiration society aspect of the Beats. Waldman attends to the near-mythic anecdotes, as well as to each figure's relationship to Buddhism. Ginsberg's wiggy scholarly foreword on the meaning of ``beat'' manages to include quotations from himself, while Waldman's lackluster introduction--citing the ``unique'' ``life styles'' of the Beats--confirms the notion that this still-popular group of writers was more significant as sociology than literature. A silly guide to ``Beat Places'' further distinguishes this odd volume from the more canonical anthology by Ann Charters, The Portable Beat Reader (1992).
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
