Wow! There is definitely a whole world where Allie Mcbeal-esque angst does not exist and I think I like it. Bukowski, of which this book was my introduction, is wholly unapologetic about his life, loves, lusts and somewhat audacious lifestyle.

I was going to say that Bukowski is more a man's writer than a women's although I wondered about the reaction to that as so many women clearly love him. But his writing is so steeped in the seedy, upfront, hard-nosed male appealing style. Maybe it is just that it is that I only know males who have read his works. Either way he is a strange fish. After this I went on to read a book of people's impressions of Buck, much more informative I think. In this I felt a little like I was left with his reflection rather than a clear insight into him.

An interesting way of meeting Buck to see if you like his stuff, or him at all.

Lots of pictures & worth the money. I bought mine at Borders--and don't regret it. Howard Sounes did a wonderful job of putting it all together. Even includes photos of some of Bukowski's old haunts (bars and such where he hung out), as well photos taken when he lived in various dives before he made it. Photos of his daughter Marina, photos of some of the women he dated--and even one of the great love of his life: Jane Cooney Baker. Not to be missed. Top notch all the way. I'd like to see them do a sequel to this. Get it if you can!

An excellent & well laid-out book displaying the life of Charles Bukowski. The book shows the real people & places depicted in Buk's poems & stories. It even has a photo of his grave which brings it home that such a lively individual is no longer with us even though new books of his unpublished/uncollected poems continue to be published. Alan/2001

I finished this book in two days. As a Bukowski fan I enjoyed learning about the people he wrote about. Still, I thought to myself, was Bukowski writing about those people so truthfully or was Sounes filling in the blanks and putting the cart before the horse in his non-fiction. I very much enjoyed it but had to give it a four because the biographer kept saying that Bukowski was in a stage of his life where he was producing the best poems ever. Seemed to be that the author was telling us this time and time again in all stages of the life of Mr. Bukowski. I could never tell what his opinion was about the best poetry done by C.B.

Here's a story kiddies, please bear with me:

Years ago I was a struggling, naive graduate student in English at a major southern university. Like a fool, I decided to write a master's thesis on Charles Bukowski. The department chair stuck me with a professor who was supposedly the resident expert on contemporary American literature. From our first conversation it was clear that the man not only had no respect for Buk, but hated his work and hated the very notion that anyone would want to do graduate level work on him. He dismissed the idea with a sniff, saying, "He's marginal and unworthy. No one has written a book on him." I am sad to report that I let the bastard get the better of me. The thesis went unwritten.

Well, that was a decade ago and since then there have been several very fine books written about Bukowski. Three excellent volumes come readily to mind: Neeli Cherkovski's seminal biography, "Bukowski: A Life"; Gay Brewer's Twayne volume, "Charles Bukowski"; and Russell Harrison's "Against the American Grain." All are top notch in their own way.

Now we have Howard Sounes' worthy addition to this list, "Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life." This new biography works well as a compliment to Cherkovski's more intimate work (Neeli and Hank were good friends and the closeness of their relationship informs every page of the text). Sounes' book is more flamboyant, to be sure, and paints Bukowski in darker colors than does Cherkovski's. Both portraits are quite valuable and, even more important, both are very good reads.

I'm still waiting, though, for the definitive Bukowski biography to emerge, a book that combines a true scholar's rigor with a novelist's eye for detail. Maybe some new English professor or graduate student coming up will grab for the brass ring. I can't help but think that our universities will finally forget their snobbery and small brained prejudices and hop on the Bukowski bandwagon.

What I would love to see published is a book that encompasses the pictures painted by Sounes, Cherkovski, Brewer and Harrison, with added chunks of personal grace and style thrown in by this to-be-named biographer. It's bound to happen some day because Bukowski's legacy is simply too daunting, too great to be ignored.

In the meantime, I recommend this book and all of the others I named above. There are other fine volumes on Buk out there, too. Go find them all and read them right away. You'll learn lots of cool stuff and be the life of your next cocktail party!

If you're a Bukowski fanatic, do yourself a favor and buy this book. Howard Sounes is a dispassionate professional; the bare Bukowski will disappoint you at times, but the whole story will also enlighten and entertain.

There have been several biographies of Bukowski: one was mediocre; one was a swerving, stream-of-consciousness rave (or a soliloquy-cry for help) written by one of Buk's old cronies; and two were sloppy, thumbnail treatments of The Man.

I doubt anyone will write a better-researched, more thorough bio of Bukowski. Sounes is a Brit, and an American biographer could possibly add a dimension, an insight or flavor that may be missing from this book. But that's quibbling.

Right now - and maybe forever - this is THE story of Charles Bukowski, the writer and THE MAN.

I'm 53 years old with three kids, a job, and a life-long obsession with Bob Dylan that isn't going away. To this day, his best songs make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. But who is this guy? And where does such extraordinary music come from? Perhaps recognizing that there are never really answers to questions like these, Howard Sounes largely sidesteps them in this excellent new biography, which doesn't pretend to reveal very much about Dylan's mind or the creative wellspring for his work. What the book does succeed at giving us is a thoroughly professional, well-researched and clearly written account of the man's life. Characteristically, Dylan refused to be interviewed, as did, apparently, his immediate family members. However, Mr. Sounes obtained a wealth of material from an array of other people, including childhood and adult friends, lovers, band members, business associates, observers, hangers-on, and the many famous and non-so-famous musicians and singers who have known and worked with Dylan over the course of four decades. Sounes even took in perspectives from individuals referenced in Dylan's songs, like William Zantzinger - the real-life and still-living villain from The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll - and Carla Rotolo, the stigmatized "parasite sister" from Ballad in Plain D. Because he's made a career of fleeing the constraints of identity, Dylan is a resistant subject for biography. Born into a nurturing middle-class Jewish family in small-town Minnesota, Dylan (then Bob Zimmerman), came of age and, following a short time at college, took to the road, and to disguise his embarrassingly conventional roots, invented outlandish myths about himself as a singing orphan hobo. Personally shy, but far less innocent than he appeared, he in fact had an overpowering ambition and confidence in his talent. Heading straight for New York City - the right place at the right time - he quickly "made it" as the angst-ridden folk and social-protest singer we know from his early recordings. He had no sooner achieved fame in this persona than he shed it like a snakeskin, reinventing himself as the seemingly nihilistic rock-and-roll poet who was to help establish the foundation for the emerging 60's counter-culture. However, this too was largely an act, and by the time the world was catching up with him, he had moved on again. At the very peak of the late 1960's cultural revolution in America, when rebellious post-adolescents were reaching out to him as a kind of Messiah, Dylan turned his back again and went conventional, retreating to a reclusive, short-haired, family-oriented lifestyle with his wife Sara and the beginnings of a family that would eventually include five remarkably well-cared-for children. Sounes suggests that this was the least contrived period of Dylan's life and the happiest. However, it wasn't to endure either, and his loving, private relationship with Sara finally broke down in bitterness and divorce. Just as the 60's lost steam and the hippies were cutting their hair and getting jobs, Dylan - forever out of cycle - resumed his scruffy, intense, hip-hillbilly style and hit the road again. His conversion to a kind of fundamentalist Christianity in the late 1970's was the most startling of his metamorphoses, and one which befuddled fans will look to this book in vain for Sounes to shed much light on. The author doesn't disparage it, but doesn't appear to get it either, any more than the fans did. Moreover, he seems to lose touch with his subject to some degree from this point on in the book. But then one gets the sense that Dylan was losing touch with himself too, putting out a series of lackluster albums and abandoning himself to endless and apparently aimless roadtouring and womanizing, not really renouncing his religion so much as back-burning it because it was hurting his career. The biography tries to end on a high note by discussing Time Out of Mind, Dylan's latest release at the time of publication. Receiving critical aclaim, the album indeed displays revived sparks of his old genius, but anyone who has experienced the stark, death-haunted tone that pervades it can't be very cheered by this paradoxical show of vitality. One feels that Sounes is whistling beside the graveyard at the end of his book. I for one believe that the hype that has surrounded Dylan for most his career is justified, and that he will probably be remembered as one of the great artists of the late-twentieth century, whether his work cheers us up or not at this stage of life. While Sounes' book fails to reveal his elusive subject, it is by far the best biographical material about Bob Dylan that has appeared to date, and I recommend it.

The enigmatic, mysterious Bob Dylan: who can really know this guy? Sounes does an excellent job of fleshing out the man behind the music, probably about as good a job as anyone could have done. He balances the personal life of Bob (at least what can be known of his personal life) with his artistic life, and presents a full-bodied, complete picture of the man and the legend. Dylan is a man of contradictions (a born-again Christian who remained sexually promiscuous, a person who would treat people insensitively and then feel badly about it but not enough to apologize, a protest singer who was reluctant to get involved in causes), but that's what makes him Dylan. Although familiar with Dylan's music over the years, plus reading many articles and interviews with him, this is the first book-length biography I have read about him, so I may not have the perspective that others do who have compared this bio to others and have found it lacking, but speaking for myself, I found it fascinating.

Bob Dylan is as much a cultural icon as one person can be in our times, but he is a secretive and lonely person. It is difficult for a biographer to weave together an honest look at such a person without their cooperation. Yet Howard Sounes does a great job of looking past the image and providing his readers with a glimpse of the person behind the legend. Without being able to interview the man himself, he uses Dylan's words from past interviews, legal records, and interviews with friends and associates to piece together a picture of the life behind the legend.

Telling the story of Dylan from birth to the year 2000, this book focuses on the details of a life devoted to a musical career. I found particularly interesting the section on Dylan's musical roots in Hibbing, Duluth, and Minneapolis. Also, interviews with some of the few people Dylan befriended over the years give us a wonderful peak at his human side. Finally, producers and musicians tell fascinating stories about recording sessions that add to our understanding of the music on his CDs. The author has interviewed many people who had contact with Dylan through the years so we get much detail, but ultimately are still only on the outside looking in. Usually Sounes takes the high road and refrains from telling salacious details.

The book will appeal to devoted fans who love Dylan's music and want to know about the person behind it. If you are new to Bob Dylan and want to understand his cultural impact, this is not the book for you. It is also a very revealing study of the isolating effect that fame can have on people.

Howard Sounes' book about the West Country's most infamous couple is an enlongated bubble gum, tabloid gossip article. Whilst I'm sure Sounes spent a lot of time researching the case and fingering through the many aspects of intricacies, the book does not delve anywhere as deep as the graves of the victims the couple butchered. The glossy account of the details is, however, intensified by the awful and very humbling circumstances in which the murderous pair grew up and met, but this has nothing to do with the author. There is minimal discussion or investigation as to the reasons why the pair undertook their Road to Hell by way of torture, ... voyeuristic prostitution, despite them being up there with the best of the serial killers. The plus point of the book is that it is written in a childish journalistic format and is thus very easy to read, almostunputdownable. The pair's heinous crimes are some of the worst I have read about and it is almost unbelievable that anyone could inflict these attrocities. For pure sensationalism and an easy introduction into the wonderful world of serial killers, this book hits the mark. But for those who want to question a little further and obtain explanations or theories as to why the necrophilliac, nymphomaniac, sadistic and self-centred pair committed such crimes, best give me a ring and we can discuss over a beer. Perhaps at a pub in Gloucester!!

I don't really see how you could call a book like this good anyway. But, I have read alot of true crime stories and I definitely thought this one is the worst. I don't feel it is very thorough. You read 4 chapters at the beginning ALL about the family history and then it just kind of jumps to everything happening. In my opinion it could have been written alot better.

If you're here, you've either heard of them from a friend or you're a serial killer reader... With that in mind, this book is NOT for anyone who can't handle feeling a little queasy.

As a girl who's read a lot of serial killer books, this one tops the gruesomely discussed catagory. The book is so thorough, Howard Sounes gives background even on their parents...so you really get to know these two people. The book takes us through to when they meet and then in painstaking detail describes each of the girls they forced into sadomasochistic sex torture...including their little girls. As I said, the book is very creepy and could provide nightmares...so buyer beware. Of course, it offers more than you'd ever dream of knowing about any two serial killers...and the two in this book, while following patterns of organized serial killing, as described by Robert Ressler, they are dumb as bricks.

Happy reading.