Goodreads | Sean's review

Sean's review

[close]

blog this review

Copy/paste the text below into your blog.

<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/412732.The_Dharma_Bums?utm_medium=api&amp;utm_source=blog_review" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img alt="The Dharma Bums" border="0" src="http://s3.amazonaws.com/photo.goodreads.com/books/1174518975m/412732.jpg" /></a> <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/412732.The_Dharma_Bums?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">The Dharma Bums</a> by <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1742.Jack_Kerouac">Jack Kerouac</a><br/><br/>
  <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/18963587?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review"><h3>My review</h3></a>
  rating: 5 of 5 stars<br/>Not quite the equal of On The Road, but I still can't bear to give it less than 5 stars. This is the other 'must read' on the Kerouac shelf (notice the two must-reads are the ones with punctuation?). Kerouac wrote this one in something like two weeks, working virtually around the clock on amphetamines, and it was never really revised or edited (unlike On the Road, which is clearly better for the editorial assistance, despite what Jack thought), so this is the raw Kerouac in the groove doing what he did best. Still, probably because he was trying to cover a mortgage on a house on Long Island for his mother, he deigned to punctuate his sentences, with the result that this one, unlike some of his later works, remains very readable and sold well, another wild ride with the king of the wild rides. This book also has the distinction, peculiarly, of being the book that first introduced me to Zen in particular and Buddhism in general, and has started something that has remained a lifelong influence. An interesting aside... though this book came out in the late 50's, Kerouac predicted in visionary moment, in a letter to his friend, poet Philip Whalen, that America would soon see a movement of spiritual seekers, "legions of rucksack wanderers", Dharma bums wandering in search of the truth. He basically predicted the counterculture of the 1960's nearly a decade before it happened. I had great fun paying back Jack's investment in my spiritual life by digging up a lot of interesting rarely-seen info on Kerouac, the beats, and Buddhism, which appeared in my nonfiction book 'One Bird, One Stone', a chronicle of Zen in America. Of course I also received my MFA in Writing from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute, which was founded some years after Kerouac's death by Allen Ginsberg and the Tibetan Lama Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, so you might say we're karmically linked!
  <br/><br/><a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1035053?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">View all my reviews.</a>

Sean's review
rating:
bookshelves: favorites
recommended for: Adventurous readers everywhere

Not quite the equal of On The Road, but I still can't bear to give it less than 5 stars. This is the other 'must read' on the Kerouac shelf (notice the two must-reads are the ones with punctuation?). Kerouac wrote this one in something like two weeks, working virtually around the clock on amphetamines, and it was never really revised or edited (unlike On the Road, which is clearly better for the editorial assistance, despite what Jack thought), so this is the raw Kerouac in the groove doing what he did best. Still, probably because he was trying to cover a mortgage on a house on Long Island for his mother, he deigned to punctuate his sentences, with the result that this one, unlike some of his later works, remains very readable and sold well, another wild ride with the king of the wild rides. This book also has the distinction, peculiarly, of being the book that first introduced me to Zen in particular and Buddhism in general, and has started something that has remained a lifelong infl...more

Like this review? yes flag

comments (showing 0-0 of 0)

newest »

date

all Sean's books »