Click here for the NY Times review of Jack Kerouac's The Sea is My Brother. It's on my reading list, so I can't say whether I agree with the Times; however, from what I know of the book, their review is quite fair. And surprisingly positive. For example:
"The Sea Is My Brother" is indeed a bad book, but it's a fun bad book and offers plenty of disarming insights into who Kerouac was as a person and writer before he slipped behind the mask of Beat Generation Zen-master channeling literature from the ionosphere. The book is enjoyable because, unlike Kerouac's later canonized work, it comes to its faults honestly, out of simple inexperience.Seems like the Times would know that you italicize book titles. Or am I wrong about that? And we won't even get into the whole issue of how Jack's estate is being handled. I'll save that for a future post.
Nevertheless, it's a review that makes me want to bump Sea farther up my reading list.
2 comments:
If the book is on your to-read list, and you haven't purchased it yet, try to get it from the UK - the UK (Penguin) edition contains a bunch of additional material (letters between Jack and Sebastian, etc.) that, for some probably idiotic reason, the US publisher chose not to include.
Already have it - Christmas gift. Oh, well . . . . Thanks for the tip, though - others may benefit!
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