This catalogue has excellent photographs that gives one a sense of the attitude of the Beat Generation. Everyone is familiar with the writers of the period, but not everyone knows about art generated during those years. This catalogue gives a review of art, film, and writing being created at the time. Not only that but it devotes a chapter to women and a chapter to minorites working during the time period. A good source of information for anyone interested in the 1950's to the early 1960's.

I LIKE THIS BOOK CONTENTS AS ITS MY SPECIAL INTEREST- ORTHOGNATHIC SURGERY.THIS BOOK CRUISES THROUGH THE PLANNING OF DENTOFACIAL DEFORMITY TREATMENT, ITS EXECUTION IN A SIMPLE WAY AND DISCUSS ALSO THE REAL CHALLENGES-THE COMPLICATIONS.IT DICLOSES BEAUTIFUL CASES,STEP BY STEP PREPARATION BOTH ORTHODONTIC AND SURGERYWISE.AMPLE LINE DIAGRAMS WITH SHADES GIVES A 3-D EFFECT,MAKES THE PROCEDURE CLEAR WITH A REALISTIC VISION.WITHOUT CONFUSION THE BOOK CLEARLY DEMONSTRATES THE BENEFIT OF TEAM WORK BETWEEN AN ORTHODONTIST AND MAXILLOFACIAL SURGEON IN ACHEIVING BEST RESULTS WHICH IS TRUE.I AM SURE ANYBODY INVOLVED IN ORTHOGNATHIC WORK WILL NOT HESITATE TO KEEP THEIR OWN COPY OF THIS CREATION.

Steven Watson does an admirable job of bringing together the various strands of Beat history through an engaging, storyteller-like style. Though he doesn't cover much new ground, his treatment of the Beat Women, Black Mountain Poets and the San Francisco Renaissance will be particularly helpful for those who are just beginning to explore the ancillary figures of the Beat movement. However, anyone already familiar with the lives of Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Kerouac will find nothing revelatory here.

One point of concern is Watson's often overzealous descriptions of Beat sexuality. While sexual liberalism was certainly a significant tenet of Beat existence, it was not, in my estimation, the raison d'etre for Ginsberg, Burroughs, Kerouac, etc. It could be argued that Neil Cassady illuminated the sexual experience for core Beats, but his contribution as an iconic figure should not be devalued by presenting him as merely the sexual driving force of the Beats. Moreover, Watons implies that Ginsberg's homosexuality was the primary facet of his literary development. This is more than debatable. Certainly, Ginsberg's supernatural visions of Blake and his relationship with his mother served a much more profound purpose.

Though Watson should be commended for his thoroughness, the result at times is an overemphasis on the sexual side of the Beats. In Watson's book, this serves to lessen the importance of the Beats' dramatic contributions to literature and poetry.

This is a great book for a numer of reasons. I'm going to list a number of them and then write a bit in conclusion.

1. It deals with many of the 'Beats' rather than focusing, as is typical, on Kerouac and Ginsberg and forgetting the rest of them. It provides an illuminating portrait of Burroughs (who is definately a key figure), Neal Cassidy (who is also), and alot of the girls, etc. who were around them. 2. It provides reading lists, etc. of what they were reading. This is HUGE if you want to understand the bitterness/despair that is found in Burroughs and Ginsberg... as well as insight into how they interpretted their life and times (i.e. because they read these books, they in a dialogic sense would interpret things along such-and-such lines.... as a psychologist would interpret a 'vision of God' one way and a believer a second.... 3. Lots of minutia/trivia that is just fun.

It's a really good book and more stimulating than one would expect from a book that is in the shape of a square. It would not suffice as a literary biography of any of the authors contained in the 'movement' nor could it supplant any social history book. But, it suppliments them and is fun to read: sort of an academic version of 'Seventeen' at points. I really love this book. I'd definately recommend this book to anyone who wants to become first among their band of friends if all their friends want to do is read a little bit of 'On the Road' and 'Howl' (and then think they know about this time period....

This is by far the best book about the Beats that I have read to date. I really enjoyed the entire book. Its a quick read, has fun anecdotes, quotes and definitions printed in the margins of every page, and delivers a tremendous amount of information about the Beat Generation. I was impressed by the amount of history covered for the main Beat characters, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Carr, and Burroughs. I especially enjoyed the in depth looks at their first meetings with one another and the focus on what each one was reading during the early years. The aforementioned writers are definitely the focus of this book, but there is also a decent amount of time dedicated to minor characters involved in the generation.
You really can't go wrong with this book, rather this will be your first introduction to the Beats or your a veteran of Beat lore, you will definitely gain something from reading this text. This book also includes an awesome year to year run down of important events in the Beat movement shown in correlation with important social and political events of the time. If you enjoy this book you may want to check out 'Rolling Stone's Book of the Beats' also, another great addition to the Beat fan's bookshelf.

In my journey to explore the Harlem Renaissance, I started with this book. I felt the author gave a good basic view of the era but he left out the soul. He focused on six or seven primary personalities of the time, from Langston Hughes to Zora Neale Hurston, and tied the times into their existence. I was left feeling like there had to be more about the era. The author also chases around issues of major character homosexuality, stating it but not really being clear about it. I was ready for it to end.

I read this book in hardcover as well as several others for a paper I wrote. The author was able to take the disparate threads of musicians, artists, writers and benefactors who contributed to the Renaissance and weave together a chronology that contained pictures, specific information about the "hotspots" in Harlem and complete, sometimes intimate portraits of all concerned. If the Harlem Renaissance was ever to be depicted in a movie, this book would be a ready-made screen play. The hardcover edition is worth the extra money.

I really enjoyed this book. I had to read it for an english class. At first I thought it was going to be hard to read and dumb due to the dialect, but as I read further into the book, I found out what a great book it was and why it was on the required reading list. I would greatly recommmend reading this book to any one who hasnot. It deals with a black woman's search for indeoendence over 25 years and 3 marriages. It is a great book and gets TWO thumbs up from me!!!

This is a meandering, disappointing, misleadingly titled book. Clearly the author wanted to write a book about the Harvard modernists and their era, including exploring "Negro chic" and the homosexual culture of the period. This would be a harder sell as a mass-circulation book, and hence the device of recruiting FOUR SAINTS as a distillation of the world he is interested in.

But the result is that one does not get enough of anything, and too much of what you didn't buy the book for. Chick Austin, Muriel Draper, and the others may have provided physical settings relevant to the gestation of FOUR SAINTS, but they did not CREATE the piece. As such, the lingering over their particular biographies is excessive in a book purportedly devoted to the birth of the opera. Too often we get lists of celebrities present at this gathering or another, complete with fawning descriptions of what they were wearing and how they decorated their rooms -- but this stems from a fan's love of a period, not a chronicling of FOUR SAINTS itself.

Thus while we read through elegant page after page gushing about Mrs. Harrison Williams and Lucius Beebe, by the end we have little idea of what went on on stage in the opera, what more than a few of the lyrics were, or how the music sounded. If it is vital for us to know how Julien Levy founded his art gallery blow by blow, why so little info on black theatre in New York before and after FOUR SAINTS? Why spend a paragraph following up on, say, Alfred Barr after SAINTS but only brief mention of what happened to any of the SAINTS cast members? This is a book about art museums mispackaged as one about the theatre.

This book is a bit of a cynical hoax. You can just feel the editor "shaping" a book about largely forgotten arts administrators and critics, the parties they went to, who they slept with, and how openly, via hanging it all on an opera which fascinates in legend because of combining a black cast with Gertrude Stein's lyrics. In the end, this book is a collection of well-written personality sketches of pictorial artists and their patrons. The author clearly has but subsidiary interest in music or theatre -- fatal in a book purporting to be about an opera.

For those who know little or nothing about the Gertrude Stein/Virgil Thompson opera "Four Saints in Three Acts," this book will provide some basic information. Those searching for any kind of in depth analysis either of the libretto or the music will be disappointed, as I was. Long on the sexual preferences of the members of the 1930's modernist elite, short on any discussion of a landmark work of art. Listen to the original cast album instead.

I came to this book hoping to learn about the creation and production of Stein's opera, and I was not disappointed. I thought the book delivered that information, and more. Watson writes well, and he tells a fascinating story of the complicated network of interpersonal relationships that were finally led this unlikely opera into production. I think Watson understands the nature of Stein's as well as anybody, although the focus of the book was not on the way the opera was written. He manages to express the way that all the participants were inspired by Stein's words in different ways, the "miracle" of their all having "to create and all of them did."