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A Blue Hand: The Tragicomic, Mind-Altering Odyssey of Allen Ginsberg, a Holy Fool, a Lost Muse, a Dharma Bum, and His Prickly Bride in India
 
 
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A Blue Hand: The Tragicomic, Mind-Altering Odyssey of Allen Ginsberg, a Holy Fool, a Lost Muse, a Dharma Bum, and His Prickly Bride in India [Bargain Price] [Paperback]

Deborah Baker (Author)
3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)


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Paperback, Bargain Price, January 27, 2009 --  

Book Description

January 27, 2009
In this engrossing new piece of Beat history, Pulitzer Prize finalist Deborah Baker takes us back to the moment when America’s edgiest writers looked to India for answers as India looked to the West. It was 1961 when Allen Ginsberg left New York by boat for Bombay, where he hoped to meet poets Gary Snyder and Joanne Kyger. Baker follows Ginsberg and his companions as they travel from ashram to opium den. Exposing an overlooked chapter of the literary past, A Blue Hand will delight all those who continue to cherish the frenzied creativity of the Beats.

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Editorial Reviews

Review

“A fabulous book—and written with great verve and nerve— about the Beats and their passage to India.”
— Michael Ondaatje

“[A] dense, exotic, intriguing saga—not just Ginsberg’s but India’s too.”
National Geographic Adventure

“A piece of devoted scholarship and legwork dunked in the screwy, hyper-intelligent, tragicomic essence of everything that drove Ginsberg to take a trip that not only changed his life but helped spawn generations of hipsters, hippies, writers, artists, rock stars, mental cases, and self-anointed medicine men.”
The New York Times

About the Author

Deborah Baker moved to Calcutta in 1990, where she studied Bengali and wrote In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding, a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in biography. Since then, her essays have appeared in a range of publications, from The New York Times to the Calcutta Statesman.

Product Details

  • Paperback: 256 pages
  • Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics); Reprint edition (January 27, 2009)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0143114832
  • ASIN: B002RAR220
  • Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 4.9 x 0.8 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 8 ounces
  • Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,226,867 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Deborah Baker was born in Charlottesville and grew up in Virginia, Puerto Rico and New England. She attended the University of Virginia and Cambridge University. Her first biography, written in college, was Making a Farm: The Life of Robert Bly, published by Beacon Press in 1982. After working a number of years as a book editor and publisher, in 1990 she moved to Calcutta where she wrote In Extremis; The Life of Laura Riding. Published by Grove Press and Hamish Hamilton in the UK, it was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography in 1994. Her third book, A Blue Hand: The Beats in India was published by Penguin Press USA and Penguin India in 2008. In 2008-2009 she was a Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis C. Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars at The New York Public Library. There she researched and wrote The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism, a narrative account of the life of an American convert to Islam, drawn on letters on deposit in the library's manuscript division. The Convert will be published by Graywolf Press and Penguin India in the spring of 2011. She has two children and is married to the writer Amitav Ghosh. They divide their time between Brooklyn and Goa.

See: http://www.deborahbaker.net/

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews
13 of 15 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
I read in the New York Times that Deborah Baker was Barack Obama's editor for his memoir, so I was curious to see if she was as good a writer as she was an editor. I'm happy to report that she is an excellent writer. I was thoroughly engrossed by A BLUE HAND. To be honest, I was never a big fan of the Beats in general, but Ms. Baker's book reads like a novel and I find her portraits of the characters to be multi-layered and complex. I especially like the complex portrait she also paints of India and New York City. I feel that I learned quite a lot about the historical period and cultural zeigeist. What's more, Ms. Baker's prose is quite lyrical. For example, I liked lines such as "A woman married in a red-and-gold Benarsi silk sari is a well-married woman. The rooftops of Benares are dotted with cross-legged old men at spinning wheels who, like latter-day Rumpelstiltskins, spin skeins of gold thread onto skeins of white silk." Her literary roots and appreciation are revealed in her judicious use of quotes from writers of the era. I highly recommend this book to readers who enjoy good prose!
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
A Blue Hand is something of a minor miracle: it somehow manages to cover the history of the main characters in roughly 100 pages- before we get to India. The writing is musical and flawless and the biook serves as perfect introductory, background text to the work of the BEATS. It is, in manay ways, a perfect course in 200 pages. I can't recommend it highly enough.
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0 of 1 people found the following review helpful
All been done before February 20, 2012
Format:Paperback
A good 1/3 or more of the book merely regurgitates what every bio since the 70s has said about Ginsberg and co. The author obviously going to great pains to add yet another book (this one totally trivial) to the already overflowing Beat-related material out there. The other 2/3rds of the book is supposed to be in regards to a very minor Beat character, Hope Savage (since all the major folks have been written about it only "makes sense" to mine what there is available of marginal participants, in this case very little). Lots of endless and trivial minutiae and speculative passages. Really tedious. Too bad as I was looking forward to reading about Ginsberg and co's travels through India. Must not be a lot of documentation.
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Inside This Book (learn more)
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First Sentence:
IT WAS WELL AFTER MIDNIGHT on December 11, 1962, and Allen Ginsberg, a thirty-seven-year-old poet from Newark, New Jersey, had gone off to pee for the umpteenth time. Read the first page
Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Allen Ginsberg, New York, Hope Savage, Nagendra Nath, San Francisco, Gary Snyder, Dalai Lama, Mira Bai, South Carolina, Buddhadev Bose, Gregory Corso, United States, Peter Orlovsky, Greenwich Village, American Express, Carl Solomon, Dudjom Rinpoche, Joanne Kyger, William Burroughs, Bankey Behari, Sonam Kazi, Jerry Madden, Neal Cassady, Elise Cowen, Jack Kerouac
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