Customer Reviews

Boxcar Bertha: An Autobiography : As Told to Dr. Ben L. Reitman

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Take it with a grain of salt. It's an interesting look at hoboism, sex, drugs, pimping, anarchy and Depression era Americana. I remember reading this book at the laundromat in Alhambra. It was quite a page turner. It doesn't matter that it's fiction disguised as an autobiography. It's still a fun read.

Getting through this book is going to take more patience than I am willing to muster. The stories told in Boxcar Bertha have so much more potential than their author lets them realize. The writing is just so awful that it completely smothers the narrative -or network of micro-narratives that make up this book. It is one of the most non-engaging adventure stories I have ever read. The author took license to write a fictional story and pass it off as autobiography, at least they could have made more of an effort to be entertaining.
I keep trying to push through Boxcar Bertha because I feel like it will lend some sort of relevant insight into marginal life in the Depression, but I don't think I can do it.
Not to mention the dubious nature of the male author attempting to portray the voice of a radical woman. What's next, privileged whites writing in the voices of radical blacks? Will that pass as meaningful, authentic work with the publishers of the radical left as well? I hope not.

"Everything I had set out in life to do I had accomplished. I had wanted to
know how it felt to be a hobo, a radical, a prostitute, a thief, a reformer,
a social worker and a revolutionist. Now, I knew."

With an ending like the above, you've gotta bet that the prior 200 pages are
a fun read.

This book is more-or-less the contemporary of that classic 1930's anti-drug
movie "Refer Madness". We encounter dope fiends, perverts, dreamers,
anarchists, abortionists and many others.

I do, so much, love reading about degenerate behavior!

Somewhere in the folds is a statement that Capitalism is evil. "Sure
society has a right to defind itself. Society has the right to send me to
jail if they get the goods on me. But I've got to eat and sleep and my
child has to have his. I don't justify myself. I know I'm wrong. I know my
example is bad. But I'm so short on funds, I have to".

So, I'm reading along. 100 pages. 200 pages. Thinking to myself, hmmm
.... this woman sure had a lot of adventures in her life.

Then ... incredible, annoying, foulness! An afterward is appended to the
text by the publisher.

"In this, the 4th time that Boxcar Bertha has been reissued, we feel obliged
for the first time to make it plain that this is in fact a work of fiction.
This takes nothing away from the book as far as we are concerned."

BALONEY! What the...?!?! I could understand if they'd let the title
stand (after all, we know that the "Autobiography of Miss Jane Pitman" is a
novel) but why did they have to leave the binding classification as
"Autobiography"???

I feel so violated. I wouldn't have invested the time if I'd know from the
start that it was fiction. This story is only good if it's true ...
there're a dozen places where I'd have thrown the book down because of
unbelievable-ness if I'd known it were fiction.

While some may have problems with Bertha's politics and promiscuity, she lives and learns and loves life honestly any way she finds it, and the author must have been in love.

So let's see...a fake autobiography about a woman hobo concerned with women hobo issues...written by a man. Poorly written at that. Also...for a 'sister of the road' this character is almost never on the road and tells almost no road stories. So lame.

While it is true that the book is fiction, it was written by Ben Reitman, and if anyone knows about his life, this could be considered the autobiography that he never wrote.

So while the person Boxcar Bertha may have not existed in real life, what she went through and who she saw are real and based upon events that occured to Ben and many others.

The book when it first came out was fiction, and most then knew it. It somehow was forgotten along the way.

Caution: This is a fictional novel, not an autobiography.

I can't say how dissapointing it is to have finished the entire book before being told that "Boxcar Bertha" was a fictional character. The publishers of this novel, by including it in their distinguished line of re-released autobiographies, have done their readers a great disservice.

Discovering that this is novel was written by a man destroyed any of the validity its social observations held. What in the novel is based in reality? Are any of its observations valid or is the entire work a portrayal of an invented world?

I focus my reading on non-fiction, and this novel would have been a great work were it an autobiography. As a work of fiction, the character is convincingly written, but now the plot seems hackneyed, contrived and offensive. Instead of an amazing story of an early feminist and radical, we have another story from a man telling us why women enjoy being prostitutes, punching bags and childish lesbians.

Readers interested in this era of American history would be better served by the autobiography of Jack Black, "You Can't Win." As far as I can determine, his book is a work of non-fiction. His observations on the hobo world are amazing - and true.

This book was what I expected it to be, and it arrived promptly in time to be used as a birthday gift.

Another raging slab of real American history you're not likely to find in the textbooks. This is the second title in the new Nabat series from AK Press that debut with Jack Black's You Can't Win. It's a window into a wildly under-appreciated dropout culture that gets left out of the stultifying fairytales that pass for history books - a much more rowdy and messily interesting tradition than the guardians of property, steeped in those other great American traditions of puritanism and hypocrisy, let on.

Hobo jungles, bughouses, whorehouses, Chicago's Main Stem, IWW meeting halls, skid rows and open freight cars - these were the haunts of the free thinking and free loving Bertha Thompson. This vivid autobiography recounts one hell of a rugged woman's hard-living depression-era saga of misadventures with pimps, hopheads, murderers, yeggs, wobblies, and anarchists.