Customer Reviews

The Buk Book: Musings on Charles Bukowski

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

 

 

"The Buk Book: Musings On Charles Bukowski" is filled with every shade of Bukowski. While really more of a compact biography than a volume of "musings," Jim Christy's relaxing, yet tight documentation provides us with glimpses of an even more outrageous Buk than we had imagined.

As a confidante and drinking buddy, Claude Powell's contribution of twenty-four photos, depicting Buk mostly in a dishelveled alcoholic state, create a compelling visual component. Pictures not likely to be found in a Black Sparrow publications any time too soon.

Jim Christy's chronological text is smooth and refreshingly unrehearsed. He slides cleanly through the years spanning from Bukowski's birth in Andernach,Germany on August 16,1920, to acquaintance Gundolf Freyermuth's April 1994 recollection of a physically "dimished" figure, but one still capable of laughing with "malicious delight." It was several weeks after Freyermuth's visit to San Pedro, when Bukowski succumbed to the lady featured in his last novel "Pulp." Death, even if you're Charles Bukowski, has the last say.

Along the way Christy drizzles in a handful of tense situations, a teaspoon of riot scenes and humored accounts of mayhem squeezed from the days and nights in the life of Charles Bukowski.

If you are new to Charles Bukowski, or if he's been burning inside your brain for a while, this book will be received well by either party.

I was not impressed with this thin book of anecdotes of Charles Bukowski. You get very little content here as the author's short time spent with Bukowski is just a glossing over of the mans life.
The book covers a very short time period where the author and photographer/friend Claude Powell spent drinking and talking about Buk's life.

Basically, you get some accounts of his past experiences and some pictures of Bukowski drunk.
I gave two stars because the pictures by Claude Powell were good and kind of funny. There is much more thorough material out there than this short book. I recommend you try the Howard Sounes biography "Locked in the arms of a crazy life" or "Bukowski in Pictures" which is a supplement by Sounes with many good pictures and text that didn't make the biography.

I enjoyed this book but felt like the author, who states that he spent a lot of time with Buk, decided to throw together this uneven, short book to make a few bucks. The only pictures appear to be from a single night in the early 70's, and appear to be pictures Buk probably didn't expect to ever be published. Enough whining...it did offer some good insights into the genius of Buk!

A shallow treatment, written by what must be a graduate school reject. Somebody who--though he makes it a point to say he corresponded with Bukowski favorably--Bukowski would have hated. A phoney. I ordered it for a class I teach and found it completely unusable. A series of anecdotes--rehashes of autobiograhpical short stories--strung together by half baked theroies. The lesson is that just because somebody loves to read an author doesn't mean they can write well at all about that author.

Sometimes when reading Bukowski, it becomes rather hard to tell the difference between his fiction and when he's embalishing on his experience. The best thing about this little book is that Christy tells us who the real people in Buk's stories were, and what really happened. It's almost a compact bio too, and I don't have the patience to read one of those huge ones about Buk's life when I could be much more pleased getting it from the man himself, even if it's not always true. A good book, but a little overpriced in my opinion.