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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List Price: $15.00Price: $5.14 You Save: $9.86 (66%)as of 12/18/2009 00:08 EST
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 809
Edition: Reprint
Format: Bargain Price
Label: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Manufacturer: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 256
Publication Date: January 27, 2009
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Studio: Penguin (Non-Classics)
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
In this engrossing new piece of Beat history, Pulitzer Prize finalist Deborah Baker takes us back to the moment when Americas 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.
Average Rating: 
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This is what Allen Ginsberg had to determine, one day when in his New York apartment, he heard the words of Blake spoken aloud, as if from nowhere and everywhere. What followed was his gyrating attempt to reconcile, integrate, manage, or at least explain this. What also followed was fame as the author of his subsequent poetic masterpiece, Howl; his visit to India's holy places and personages; and what became a lifelong pilgrimage of offbeat but unquestionable religious devotion.
It ... Read More
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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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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 ... Read More
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Strange book. It left me with the feeling that if I really wanted to find out what that time was like for the major characters I'd need to do my own research. I thought Allen Ginsberg was represented as a rather pathetic, emotionally damaged, spiritually immature person. This may have been true, but how could anyone writing about him today possibly know that? Rambling and at times incoherent, the book disappointed.
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During the 1970s there were the punks, during the 1960s there were the hippies, and during the 1950s, and beyond, the Beatniks were the epitome of America's counterculture. Normally from respectable, if not wealthy families, and highly educated to boot, the Beatniks frightened conservative, Eisenhower era America with there drug use, displays of both hetero and homo sexualities, and willingness to embrace other counterculture figures as Dr. Timothy Leary. However, it was not only conservative America ... Read More
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Dewey Decimal Number: 809
Edition: Reprint
Format: Bargain Price
Label: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Manufacturer: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 256
Publication Date: January 27, 2009
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Studio: Penguin (Non-Classics)