Dennis McNally

Poor Jack. A victim of his own success.
This is a very thourogh biography of Jack Kerouac, and it has quite a bit about the other people in the "Beat" movement, and a little bit about the events and people that shaped the times. Jack is the focus of the book, and his story, to me, is a sad one. It's just a shame that his personal demons ended up overshadowing his literary genius. I visited his grave in 2001, and mourned all of this before. And 19 years haven't changed how I feel.

Some lighthearted rememberances in here too! My favorite was this quote, as it combines my love of baseball with my love of Kerouac: Jack “... defended Ted Williams and attacked baseball’s Boudreau shift (which put virtually the entire team on one side of the field to stop Ted) as “unnatural,”...” I totally agree with the man, as those shifts are now so commonplace in the game. I hate the shifts!!!

“Goodbye, drunken ghost.” "Above all else, the road endures."… (més)

Eh... this was a little disappointing. I can see why these were previously unpublished. I love the Dead, but I'm not going to 5-star this just because it's Jerry. This seems like McNally found some tapes of him and Jerry talking, and he realized there are people who will pay to hear the tapes (or read the transcripts), so it's easy money. The first half wasn't very interesting to me - somewhere around chapter 5 or so Jerry starts talking about Neal Cassady, and that segues into discussions of the music, and the composition of the jams & so on (the stuff I want to hear about). This is a situation where, had I not been listening to the audiobook (which is basically the original recordings interspersed with occasional narration), I likely would have abandoned the print copy. If you're hoping for something more autobiographical in nature, this isn't it. Likewise, there are better Grateful Dead memoirs out there - check out Phil Lesh's [b:Searching for the Sound: My Life with the Grateful Dead|279410|Searching for the Sound My Life with the Grateful Dead|Phil Lesh|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1440741815s/279410.jpg|271018] or Bill Kreutzmann's [b:Deal: My Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams, and Drugs with the Grateful Dead|23014599|Deal My Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams, and Drugs with the Grateful Dead|Bill Kreutzmann|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1415428582s/23014599.jpg|42580741].… (més)