Rating: 
Summary: The work of a genius but not quite of the first rank
Review: This novel is, like most of Kerouac's writings, autobiographical. It is based on the adventures he had continually roaming about the United States in the late 1940's, when he was in his late 20's, by himself and with his friends, especially one Neal Cassady, who grew up in the midwest and southwest with a violently alcoholic hobo father, spending his time in skid row hotels, jails, reform school, riding trains, stealing cars and shoplifting and panhandling and hustling and boozing and screwing females left and right, and generally just having a grand old time. Cassady somehow developed a correspondence while in reform school in New Mexico with one of Kerouac's friends in his intellectual hipster clique at Colombia University in New York and through that friend Kerouac eventually met Cassady. Anyway, part one of the novel, which is roughly 110 pages, contains some of the best writing anyone has done anywhere at anytime. Kerouac is the narrator in the novel and gives himself the fantastic name of Sal Paradise. The charaters he encounters, the situations in which he is involved, the scenery he passes are all described with extraordinary simplicity, vividness and plausibility. Riding with farmhands, hitchiking with "Eddie", partying in Cheyenne, Wyoming are some of the highlights that lead to Sal catching up in Denver and staying with his friends for a time. And what a wierd group of friends they are! Some are intellectuals, some are not, all enjoy partying, boozing, making love (a euphemism) and so on. Here we first get a full picture of Neal Cassidy, or as he is called in the book, Dean Moriarty. He spends alot of time engaged in conversations about spiritualism with Sal's friend Carlo Marx (in real life Allan Ginsberg)and rushing back and forth between the homes of his two girlfriends, Marylou, a slut, and Camille, decent and respectable, for bouts of fornication. After leaving Denver, he goes to live with his friend Remi and his unpleasant, sexy girlfriend in a shantytown just outside San Francisco and works with Remi as a policeman watching over a barracks full of drunken naval shipyard workers and has a great many adventures. It keeps getting better and better. After his relationship becomes too strained with Remi, he leaves and eventually ends up meeting on a bus in Bakersfield (or was it in Hollywood) a beautiful four foot ten Mexican woman named Terry and they end up having an affair and Kerouac's (Sal's) description of their cotton picking and encounters with Terry's family and other adventures in rural California are extraordinarily plausible and vivid. This is brilliant stuff, baby. But, of course, he is forced to move on and leave Terry and her seven year old son, Johnny and head back to New York, and the novel moves into part two. After this, until the journey into Mexico at the end of the book, the novel is something of a mixed bag. Sal (Kerouac) eventually hooks up with Dean (Neal Cassady)and Marylou and they begin another journey. Kerouac laboriously describes the scenery in the various states they pass through in Dean's automobile. He often does a beautiful job of it. He describes the places where they stopped to eat and get gas and a few incidents with the police and getting stuck in the mud, and so on. He describes the hitchikers they pick and they all seem quite plausible. But there is a very noticeable lack of action and it is quite a letdown from the great energy of part one. They end up in just outside of New Orleans. They visit Old Bull Lee (in real life William Burroughs) in his shack with his wife, Jane, and their two kids. Old Bull is described, among other things, as being formerly part of a drug smuggling ring in North Africa, a waiter (and bartender too)in Paris, Chicago and New York, a former student of medicine in Vienna, and now is living in this shack as described above, studying Shakespeare among many other subjects, gaining a small income from growing black peas in Texas, and receiving some allowance money from his family which he completely wastes on a violent drug habit. Kerouac handicaps himself, I think, by trying to deal with this figure who is just too bizarre to be real, even if it is a completely accurate portrayal of Burroughs, though he does manage to make Old Bull's implusiveness and drug-induced haze seem very real. From then on, the story becomes too complicated to describe. The main characters of the story keep rushing back and forth between San Francisco, Denver, New York and then back again, among other places along the way. There is some very decent writing in these parts as during Sal's solitary walk in the black section of Denver and view of the softball game or the poignancy of Dean after getting kicked out by Camille in San Francisco. But there are many times when Kerouac, instead of giving plausible, vivid portrayals, seem to be rushing through the scenes, as during the partying in Denver where Babe Rawlins's aunt is described, or the section where Dean and Sal stay with the coal truck driver woman Frankie, and her poet thirteen year old daughter. There are other times, such as in San Francisco and Chicago where Dean and Sal spend alot of time in bob jazz clubs but instead of describing vividly the estacy of his and Dean's(Neal's) love for jazz, Kerouac becomes rambling and maudlin. There are other times, when Kerouac indulges in spiritualist mumbo jumbo as when he is attempting to describe an out of body experience or some such thing that he had while going mad with hunder on the streets of San Francisco or during the conversation between Dean and Sal in the travel bureau car as it rode from San Francisco to Sacremento. At times Dean becomes a very plausible and sympathetic figure, as when he is telling stories about his boyhood, other times he is a very brutal version of the "Fonz" from "Happy Days," other times he is so violently hyperactive and speaks so strangely that it is very difficult to comprehend him. But as we come to the last fourty or so pages of the book, Kerouac recovers the solid brilliance of part one. Dean, Sal and their friend Stan make a journey into Mexico, party and smoke marajuana and get drunk and dance with the ladies of a rural brothel, spend the night in a bug-infested jungle, end up in Mexico city where Sal contacts dysentery. As the book concludes, Dean suddenly becomes a completely vivid figure. I saw all the demons that drove him to such incredible impulsiveness, his incredible womanizing, his decent impulses. I felt like I had very much seen him before.
Rating:
Summary: A paean to the people and possibilities of America
Review: Has there been any other writer in this century who loved America, the green and golden rolling landscape, the exuberance, the optimism, the sheer *idea* of America, more than Jack Kerouac? In an endlessly unrolling stream of wild, excited, energetic prose, we're carried across this country with wide eyes, taking in a rush of images and people, all our senses immersed in the journey, becoming part of the American epic ... an America where every individual has the potential to be larger than life, to participate in the joy of being alive. It's all the more powerful for not stinting on the darkness and disappointments we'll encounter along the way; life is all the more precious for them. Not for everyone, obviously, but a book to be experienced by those who seek something more than the Everyday. Does it provide all the answers? No, of course not - it simply reminds us that it's worth going out and looking for those answers, and that the search is as important as whatever truth we eventually find. Highly recommended!
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Summary: But have you heard it?
Review: Yes. I read On the Road years ago - and went back to certain chapters during certain chapters in my life. Ive read the articles on Kerouac, saw a few films, mourned the death of Burroughs. I thought I had all the experiences one could have with Kerouac's classic - until I discovered this new version. This is the audio of On the Road - read by actor Matt Dillon. Dillon (Drugstore Cowboy, etc.) - captures the exact voice in my head I heard when reading Kerouac. Listening to this recording is a great way to re-experience a classic. It doesnt matter if you've read the book once or 100 times - letting someone read Kerouac to you is quite something. Highly recommend.
Rating: 
Summary: Pretense to the aside.
Review: Kerouac crafts a rushing, boundless novel whose energy is inspiring and infectious. Though I do agree with some of the criticism that the book was pretentious and arrogant, I feel that any piece of autobiography will fall into this gully. Engaging in an autobiography is thus a setting aside of one's own hubris and a zippered engagement in the mind of another. My only real objections were Kerouac's taking the responsibility of "reporting" on black culture of the 50s to white America, and thus bringing in obvious tussles with representation, as well as his allegiance to a "hipster" chic which elitizes (nouns can be verbs) the novel's settings and characters. However, if you understand all of this, the novel's effects, you can freely engage in the absurdity and basking-in-his-own-sauna attitude of Kerouac, watching wide-eyed at the fury of he and his companion's journies across an America that still exists (Go conquer it!). Beautiful imagery and cold/hot parallels, along with the exploration of an America that was deemed "conquered" at that point, seals the adventure and keeps the reader saddled into whatever beat car the characters are traveling in. Recommended for the oblivious and the knowledgable beyond self-aggrandizing hubris.
Rating: 
Summary: A "Classic"?
Review: Maybe it's because I was forced to read the book. Maybe it's because my mom told me she hated it. But for some reason, I didn't like 'On The Road' that much at all. I found it to be arrogant, lacking in point, and, most of all, boring. Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarity were, to me, boring and overtly characterized.
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Summary: my boyfriend gave me this book
Review: and I loved it. It is definately something everyone should read because to not read it is to miss out on a great perspective on a unique era in our recent history. Even though I did not really identify with any of the characters like I thought I would, I am really glad I read it. The storyline and characters reminded me of Catcher in the Rye... Maybe it's just me?
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Summary: Why not!!
Review: Don't forget that Kerouac comes from France, brittany exactly...
Rating: 
Summary: Escapist lit
Review: Only due to the appeal that the true genuis pukes up greatness does Kerouac survive. Not revise, written in three weeks on a roll of paper, completely autobiographical. Completely pretentious, completely devoid of substance, completely and utterly a symbol for America. Maybe it does have a place in our heritage after all.
Rating:
Summary: READ THIS BOOK
Review: " So in America when the sun goes down and i sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long , long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa i know by nody he children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and dont tou know that god is Pooh Bear? The evening must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows whats going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty. I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty."- Sal Paradise in On the Road, by Jack Kerouac
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Summary: Lonely Thoughts and Be-bop Jazz
Review: America has changed since Sal and Dean first set out way back in the 1940's. Paved fifty times over in many places. But perhaps that's what makes the book so intriguing; there will always be people who feel compelled to take off down those same roads, the same way, taking those same turns in neutral. Back then, with Kerouac's writing there came a new language that played alongside a new music and a new way of living. But our natural response to run from anxiety, responsibility, and fear is nothing new. Who has never felt compelled to crawl out their window when the walls begin to squeeze? Who has never felt the urge to escape? If you read this book hoping for a well wrought story, you might be disappointed. The writing won't take you down adventurous new turns and twists of plot either. But I don't think it's supposed to. This book will take you to familiar places.
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