Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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48 of 48 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Poor Gentle Flesh, There's No Answer., January 10, 2006
"On the Road" may be considered the classic Kerouac novel, the archetype of Beatnik prose, but I would recommend "Dharma Bums" over "On the Road," as the best Kerouac read and the most important of Kerouac's works. I would even recommend "Dharma Bums" over the Kerouac Reader or other beat anthologies.
I'm always the first to admit that my perceptions of books are colored by the context of my life when I read it. I first read "Dharma Bums" when I was in college in Boulder, Colorado, I was an apathetic academic but had a budding interest in Buddhism and was sitting in for sunrise meditation with a Zen group at a Buddhist temple. I didn't own a car, rode my bike everywhere, hiked, rock climbed, and indulged in other beat-like habits. Still, I think I started all of Kerouac's books somewhere along the line, some multiple times, and "Dharma Bums" was the only one I finished.
Having just now reread it, it continues to stand apart from his other works. Kerouac's writing is always interesting to me but it is hard to move forward sometimes without a story arch. When reading Big Sur, for example, in which he writes as elegantly as possible about descending into the madness of alcohol psychosis, I find it hard to maintain my momentum.
"Dharma Bums" represents a time, a naive time in retrospect perhaps, but a fun exciting time when the beats were young, full of energy and enthusiasm, and really believed they were on to something cosmic. Over the course of this book we see Kerouac's Buddhism deepen. In fact, more than deepen, it matured and softened, evolving from austere and ascetic into something much more philosophical. More Zen, less dogmatic, not necessarily in conflict with indulgence and gratification. And things are happening in the book, there are elements of plot in the narrators travels and adventures. They climb a mountain as a spiritual practice, and, after struggling with paralyzing fear, Kerouac learns the great lesson "you can't fall off a mountain." There is the suicide of Rosie, a manic psychotic he was entrusted to baby-sit. There is various other traveling, hitchhiking, and meditating adventures, and the book wraps up with enchanting nature prose, written during solitary days as a wilderness fire lookout.
I had to check this out of the library to reread it, (see my listmania, "Books I wish weren't packed away at my in-laws"). My interest in Zen was sparked by this book initially and re-reading it drove me right back to the mat.
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54 of 56 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Worth every penny!, August 14, 2003
By A Customer
Man, I don't know where to start. "The Dharma Bums" is a masterpiece of the Beat Generation and a novel I will not soon forget. After The Loser's Club by Richard Perez, this is the best book I've read all year.Jack Kerouac wrote this story about his days as a Zen Buddhist and rucksack wanderer. His alias in the book is Raymond Smith, and he is living in Berkley with his good buddy Alvah Goldbook(Allen Ginsburg). Ray meets a Zen Lunatic named Japhy Ryder(Gary Snyder), and together they travel the mountains and pastures of Central California trying to find themselves and find the true meaning of life. Ray also journies to Desolation Peak in Washington and lives there alone for the summer, which is just another chapter to this amazing piece of literature. Another part of this book that impressed me was the beginning, when Kerouac wrote about his experience at the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance, and spoke of Alvah Goldbook's first reading of his poem "Wail", which in reality was Allen Ginsburg's legendary first reading of "Howl", which to this day is a Beat Literature classic. While reading this book, I was constantly marking lines and passages, because some of the descriptions and poetry Kerouac included in this novel are simply amazing. "The Dharma Bums" is one of those books I will treasure forever and read over and over again.
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24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Life is great!, August 15, 2000
Having heard me praise this book countless times, my wife finally read it for herself. Her response? "You know, I was expecting some stereotype of `cool' Beatniks, trying to be so hip and detached. But that's just some popular media image. The people in this book are exuberant, thoughtful, even spiritual!" That sums it up as well as anything. Forget the glib idea of alterna-cultural one-upmanship that passes for a Beat attitude these days - "The Dharma Bums" is about naïve exuberance, anything-but-ironic soul-searching, an eager exploration of life's sorrows and joys, and the sheer, exhilarating, wondrous zest of being alive and aware in an endlessly fresh world. If reading this clear mountain stream of a book doesn't make you want to change your life and your way of looking at life, then you're just hopelessly blind to something precious! Life is so much more than the neatly packaged, pre-imagined commercial that society would love to sell you, and "The Dharma Bums" will gladly show you one possible way of finding your true path.
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