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Summary: One of the All-Time Greats
Review: One of the best (and most well-known) books Kerouac ever wrote! Takes you on a dream-like journey through America and its people.
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Summary: A good starting point
Review: This novel is a good first read to the uninitiated of the Kerouac writing style. It gives a sense of the energy that is conveyed in all of his writings. However, to get the true feel of Jack Kerouac this is only the beginning of the road. He has many other novels that were published un-edited which give a much truer sense of how he wanted to write, unfettered of style and rules. A good starting point for the new beat reader.
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Summary: man, this is just awesome
Review: i don't even know where to begin with a book like on the road. it's full of so much energy, so much intensity, it is a musical, poetic read. it's one everyone should read, and it deserves to be re-read over and over.
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Summary: The Beat Counterpart of Hemingway's 'The Sun Also Rises'
Review: On The Road is probably one of the greatest works of the 20th Century that has gone unrecognized by society and the world as a whole. Kerouac's style is masterful, precise, and blazingly descriptive. It's a virtual miracle that he isn't more popular than he is. There's a certain romance to On The Road. A lone figure, Sal Paradise, starts out from New England to head for the West Coast. He has no idea what will happen along the way, and God only knows what he'll do once he gets there! His counterpart, Dean Moriarty is the person most of us would like to be, but can't. He's a figure built on irresponsibility, charming ignorance, and the mentality that will get him out of any bad situation. Paradise goes all over this land with his comrade in an attempt to find himself, and realizes that all he had to do was look in his own city for solace. All he would ever need was within his grasp the whole time. This book is full of descriptive detail and a streak of knowledge that only a true figure who lived his life "on the road" would know. I recommend this book for anyone who has read Ernest Hemingway's work especially. Just as Hemingway was the epitome of the Lost Generation, so Kerouac is the epitome of the Beat Generation. I also strongly recommend this book for anyone who feels they need to travel, or expand their horizons in order to find themselves. They'll be met with an astonishing truth after reading this novel.
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Summary: Take your time with this book
Review: "On the Road" is not the book for you if you like easy plots and an easy read. The passages are long, but musical, and the action meanders along, then takes sudden shifts as Sal and Dean and their friends jolt along to their next adventures. The pictures Kerouac draws in your mind are breathtakingly beautiful, provided you take the time to read his descriptions carefully. This book needs to be savored to be enjoyed, but if you take the time necessary to properly digest this book, you won't be disappointed.
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Summary: This is your brain on drugs
Review: An excruciating read. The only scene in the book worth any merit was the scene in the jazz club. Kerouac was a conservative that wanted to see how the other half lived. I am tempted to say his cognitive dissonance played a major role in his alcoholic downfall. If you walk the walk, talk the talk.
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Summary: Thoughts On The Road
Review: Whilst on holiday in Los Angeles I encountered a run down book shop on Santa Monica Blvd and picked up a battered On The Road by the wonderful Jack Kerouac, I love American prose authors had a bargain of an almost original edition.Strangely enough I did not really get into the book until I went on holiday the following year while lounging by the pool, so this book fills me with happy memories for more reason than one. Its serious, its funny, makes you really feel a spirit of the 50's. I am only 25 so will have no recollection of the whole 'Beat' era, but I kind of feel through this that I do. Its dead cool and needs to be read by every secret Rebel Without A Cause out there. READ IT!
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Summary: Yup - it IS the book of the century
Review: There are many better stylists, many profounder intellects, but no-one better captured the sheer kinetic energy of life in the century just gone than Kerouac, and this was the book in which he did it. Too much has been written already - enough to say that Kerouac intuitively felt both the insane promise of life lived at reckless pace, and the terrifying loneliness that was such a life's dark side. He was honest to both visions, and it is that - his searing emotional honesty - that makes this book still essential and moving reading. (His honesty remained on show in "Big Sur" the most lacerating first-person account of alcoholic descent that I imagine it is possible to read). "On The Road" is the only book that I can say with certainty has changed my life, powering me off as a young traveller to riches and losses and experiences I would not otherwise have tasted. If Kerouac has remained in enduring fashion, at least since the 60s, so too has it always been MORE fashionable to deride him. If you haven't read this, I urge you to do so. If you're looking for the antidote to Kerouac - the argument that aimless movement is death, not life, I strongly recommend Paul Bowles's small masterpiece "The Sheltering Sky."
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Summary: Wow Here We Go Fast Look Out!
Review: America! You beautiful, manic, desperate, crazy, wild hungry continenton wheels! You deserve a joyride of a novel, a book too fast for thecovers to contain. Just read that great On the Road, it was wow --loved it, and Kerouac said ah-ha-ha! and I said, wait you're tellingme this book was written in 1956!....
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Summary: "ON THE ROAD", LIBRO EMOTIVO
Review: Hace años he leído este libro, ahora lo he vuelto a reeler; tengo que decir que me sigue emocionando.
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