Review by New York Times Review
A graphic history of the Beat Generation. THE writers of the Beat Generation had the good fortune to give themselves a name and to write extensively about their lives, in novels like Jack Kerouac's "On the Road" and William Burroughs's "Junkie," in poems like Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" and, later, in memoirs like Joyce Johnson's "Minor Characters" and Hettie Jones's "How I Became Hettie Jones." Jones once said they couldn't be a generation because they could all fit in her living room, but in the popular imagination they were much more than the sum of their body parts or writings. They were a brand. When the country still considered literary writers and poets important public figures, these were literary writers and poets who came with luridly colorful lives, full of sex and drugs and cars, "the best minds of my generation," "the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live," cultural avatars who were often linked more by lifestyle considerations than by writerly ones. If they inspired lots of bad poetry set to bongos and little poetic discipline, they have even more effectively escaped disciplined literary or historical analysis. They rocked; they posed a threat to the nation's youth. Either you got them or you didn't. What could matter compared with that? "The Beats" moves this mythology into the comics realm, where it finds a nice fit. In the introduction, Harvey Pekar and the lefty historian Paul Buhle write that the book has "no pretension to the depth of coverage and literary interpretation presented by hundreds of scholarly books in many languages," adding that "no one claims this treatment to be definitive. But it is new, and it is vital." The pages that follow, mostly written by Pekar and illustrated by his frequent collaborator Ed Piskor, live up to both of those claims, while also living down to the caveats. "The Beats" is plainly celebratory. The writers and artists don't try to untangle the Beats' hazy history - which is often drawn from works of fiction - or to examine their writings. There are almost no quotations. But the medium provides a new angle on a familiar story, in a voice more directly empathetic than those of many prose histories. It gives the hipsters back their body language. In a book that is largely about license and the enlightened rebel, it is easy to find reflections of both in the graphic form. The panels, which are flat and often horrific, capture the dullness and insanity not only of the lives the Beats sought to escape but of the ones they made in their place. The Beats here inhabit a world that looks a lot like Harvey Pekar's Cleveland. No wonder they had to go go go and not stop till they got there. Some of the history is off. Jan Kerouac was not shown by a blood test to be Jack's daughter (the test was inconclusive), and Pekar scrambles the chronology of some of Kerouac's books and stylistic breakthroughs. Nancy J. Peters, a part owner of the City Lights bookstore in San Francisco, was unwisely tapped to help write the chapter on the store, which includes lines like "City Lights is not only a bookstore and publisher, it's a historic public space and an international cultural center," and "Today, City Lights has come to symbolize the American spirit of free intellectual inquiry." Here, nonobjective history gives way to plain self-promotion, and not even cool self-promotion. And sometimes the scope of history overwhelms the panels. There's too much to tell, and the telling gets clunky and dutiful: "Another 1950 occurrence was Kerouac's trip with Cassady to Mexico City, where Burroughs had been living since his last drug bust and working on 'Junkie,' a classic of its kind, which Ginsberg, who was always acting as an unpaid agent for other writers, encouraged him to write and finally got Ace Books to publish." THE freshest chapters are on the less well-known characters, and those in which the writers insert themselves. Nick Thorkelson and Pekar, in their hallucinatory chapter on the jazz-influenced poet Kenneth Patchen, begin: "My high school friend Dave Burton turned me on to Kenneth Patchen's picture poems in 1961. We were on the lookout for anything 'beat,' which for us meant tough, funny . . . & ecstatic. Patchen had it all!" This, perhaps, is the Beats' true legacy: the impact they continue to have on people who encounter them for the first time, even if that impact isn't literary. Discussions of "On the Road" tend to begin, "I was 17 when I first read it, and it made me . . ." in ways that discussions of "Ulysses" or "The Great Gatsby" do not. (They tend to end there as well, alas.) "The Beats" captures some of the wonder of that first encounter and places it in historical and political context. Here was a group of writers who hoped to change consciousness through their lives and art. They fit America's romance with the outsider. That they were products of elite colleges - Harvard, Reed, Columbia, Swarthmore - and owed their visibility to nonoutsider publications like Mademoiselle and this newspaper is a paradox "The Beats" chooses not to engage. They rocked. John Leland, a reporter at The Times, is the author of "Hip: The History" and "Why Kerouac Matters."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Well researched and earnest, this book might work best as a superficial Cliffs Notes on the beats, but in no way does it inspire or open the mind as the works of the authors covered do. Much of this volume feels like leftovers from coauthor Pekar's American Splendor, and one wonders if that magazine's "drab and normal" style of illustration is appropriate for the more adventurous/experimental/flamboyant beats. Nor does it help that the art used on the best-known authors (Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs) feels rushed, with little detail and little variation. Because Joyce Brabner's script about "Beatnik Chicks" takes a genuinely critical eye to an aspect of the beats others prefer to ignore-their rampant sexism- it's probably the best and most passionate writing in the collection, with Jerome Neukirch's art for the bio of proto-beat Slim Brundage being the artistic standout illustrations. Lance Tooks, Peter Kuper and Nick Thorkelson also make strong contributions, while Jeffrey Lewis's story on poet/musician Tuli Kupferberg is a wonderful puzzle piece to work through; it's the most ambitious entry and may be the truest to the artistic vision of the beats themselves. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by School Library Journal Review
Gr 10 Up-Buhle has brought together a heady group of writers and artists to create a well-informed, engaging, and dynamic presentation of the core precursors and descendants of the Beat ethos in both literary and popular American life. The first half of the volume, drawn by Piskor, interweaves the development, achievements, and interactions of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and, to a lesser degree, William S. Burroughs. Details such as Kerouac's left-handedness and Ginsberg's changing physique across his life span are shown, while snippets from their writings are suitably incorporated into the text, which is both discursive and critical. The remainder of the volume comprises 22 pieces, most by Pekar, exploring related figures, like Michael McClure and Lawrence Ferlinghetti; contemporaries whose personal circumstances varied enough from the core of Beats to demand artistic and life expressions that differed from the canonical Beat identity, including LeRoi Jones, Diane di Prima, and Kenneth Patchen; and related arts including visual and jazz. Joyce Brabner, Trina Robbins, Peter Kuper, and Lance Tooks are among the 17 contributors to the volume, which belongs in every library where any Beat literature has a home. This is a perfect gateway to both the art and the era for today's teens to access the Beat world.-Francisca Goldsmith, Halifax Public Libraries, Nova Scotia (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
An illustrated tour of the world of hepcats, bongo bangers and other denizens of the bohemian 1950s. The culture of the '50s really began in the '40s, when Jack Kerouac started palling around with Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and others of their experimental, countercultural ilk. Fittingly, Pekar (Students for a Democratic Society: A Graphic History, 2008, etc.) and Buhle (American Civilization/Brown Univ.; editor: Isadora Duncan: A Graphic Biography, 2008, etc.) begin this pen-and-ink survey of Beat Generation icons with that trio. Their exploits will be well-known to readers familiar with their contributions to literature. In the hands of the profoundly dyspeptic Pekar, however, the less-than-appealing aspects of the threeKerouac's alcoholism and right-wing extremism, Ginsberg's pederasty, Burroughs's bad aim with a pistolare laid bare. But we still read their work and that of many of their contemporaries, and one of the best things about this collection by various handsincluding art by noted underground cartoonist Jay Kinney and text by surrealist doyenne Penelope Rosemontis that it elevates lesser-known figures tied to Kerouac and company. Among those are Kenneth Rexroth (who pointedly asked not to be numbered among the Beats, but has been labeled so evermore all the same), Diane Di Prima, Michael McClure, Kenneth Patchen, Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones), Gary Snyder, Philip Lamantia and even Tuli Kupferberg, beatified octogenarian and rabble-rousing Fug. Again, this roster will harbor no surprises for those who know the Beats, but those who do not may be surprised at how varied the movement wasand how different its East and West Coast branches were. The only serious drawback is that few of the drawn figures look much like their real-life counterparts. Instead, it seems, they are shifted one contemporary to the leftGinsberg looks like William Gaines, Kerouac like Gregory Corso, Patti Smith like Joan Baez, and so on. A worthy introduction to the makers of Howl, Naked Lunch, On the Road, Turtle Island and a small library's worth of enduring books. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
