Big Sur by Jack Kerouac Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Big Sur
Book Review: A book for non-poseurs
Summary: 5 Stars
I love this book. It's deeply flawed and that's what makes it perfect. I read it some years ago while on a trip through the American Southwest and ever since then I occassionally pick it up and read around in it, as William Saroyan used to say, and every time I fall into the spell of JK's writing. "Big Sur" is heartfelt and true like few other novels. I'm sick of the whole Beat revival but this is a great, sad book, better and more honest, I think, than Kerouac's more famous "On the Road."Book Review: A lacerating account of alcoholic descent
Summary: 5 Stars
Jack Kerouac is famed as the great romantic of the American road, but that reputation ignores his greatest quality as a writer - his searing honesty. By the mid-60s, Kerouac was barely recognisable as the poet laureate of footloose youth. He was bloated, depressed, and romantically disappointed. He was also an alcoholic. One of the many heartbreaking passages in "Big Sur" records his inability to hitch a ride up the Californian coast. Americans, en route to the summer of love, had annexed "beat" culture into the rising ethic of hippie-dom. Kerouac couldn't relate to it, and nor could the hippies relate to him. This cult hero for many hippies couldn't thumb a ride because - overweight, middle-aged and dressed as a down-at-heel working man - Kerouac looked no part of the hippie dream that, in part, he had helped inspire. Alone, lonely, drinking heavily and in terrible emotional and spiritual pain, Kerouac miraculously (for us) sustained his extraordinary honesty about his condition. This, his most truly personal book, is agonising to read - but it is through this book that we come to know him best, and most deeply feel his tragedy. If you've ever worried about your own drinking, this is the book to keep you sober.Book Review: A new perspective?
Summary: 5 Stars
"Cliches are cliches because they are truisms and truisms and truisms because they are true.....". Paraphrasing maybe but the essence of Kerouacs self-fulfilling prophecy is elementary and perhaps helps us to pause and think of the basics. Millions have read it and millions will try and tell you that 'they' know what it means, but these are hero-worshipers and vain in the extreme. Take time to write that letter to the friend you haven't heard from in years, visit the old haunts and sit down and read that book again. This time it seemed to whisper in MY ear a lesson in how not to live. He sure could write though!Book Review: Amazing!
Summary: 5 Stars
Someone else reviewed this book and said it is better than 'On the Road'. I completey agree. I would like to add that if you are new to Kerouac, this book is not the one to begin with. I think the only way to really get it is to read other books by him, namely, 'On the Road'. Jack Kerouac is an amazing writer, and this book is just that, AMAZING. His free spirited character from 'OTR' is deconstructed to a point that is real and in your face. This book is dark but it opens the readers eyes to what the real Jack Kerouac was like.Book Review: An Amazing Read
Summary: 5 Stars
Some of his most beautiful & poetic lyrics in this memoir and at the same time very real, scary and certainly dark in large sections--it's a paranoid view of the world that precedes what the Bay Area has indeed turned into, covering great speedways down the Bay Shore Freeway (280) from Los Gatos and San Jose and up into the City, Frisco and the comercialism and hangers on that delude and ruin every scene, perverted and idealistic, glorious and sorrowful ... and the poetry on the beach is just wonderful, Jack's translations of the Pacific Ocean into the English language.