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Summary: !!
Review: This is one of my all time favorite books. No, it didnt change my life. It is just a beautiful prose novel. While reading "On The Road", I find myself thinking of my group of friends and relating them to characters in this novel. Kerouacs best work.!!!
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Summary: A wondeful book
Review: Everyone ive ever met who has read this book has a sudden urge to wonder cross country like Dean, and Sal, and after i read On The Road, i felt no different. This is the type of Book that you just cant put down, and i reccomend it to everyone.
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Summary: addressing those "wandering spirits"
Review: "We were all delighted, we all realized we were leaving confusion and nonsense behind and performing our one and noble function of the time, move. And we moved!" Fans of Kerouac just aren't going to like me much. Now don't get me wrong, the book was okay for what it was: a snapshot of a different time. I read over and over again how "this book changed my life and blah blah blah..." According to the blurb on my copy, it is, "quite simply one of the greatest novels and major milestones of our time." I can't comprehend the fact that this book could change the life of anyone in my generation. The characters are not very likable and I can't imagine myself enjoying the situations they find themselves in. The writing seems extremely average to me. I have a gnawing feeling I read a different book than everyone else I ever talked to about Kerouac's "masterpiece". Several scenes are fairly strong and memorable, especially when he was hitchiking alone, and I know that Kerouac is addressing those "wandering spirits" that exist independant of what decade it is, as well as talking about being lost as a young adult. Still, I have to wonder how one could identify so much with any of the characters in the book without being a total moron. His metaphors are inane, and not even in a good way ("This was a manuscript of the night we couldn't read"), and he only gives us small snapshots of the late 40's "underground" - a paragraph about Wilheilm Reich and his orgones here, a paragraph or two about jazz there. Perhaps the characters were (lying on their) hip in the 40's and 50's, but they're just not cool now. They seem like a collection of cardboard cutouts of parrots. I have no problem with drugs (hell, I like William Burroughs), but the way Kerouac addresses their drug use seems off the cuff and almost as if it was inserted extemporaneously to make the book more "edgy" (or hip, if you insist). Recommendation: If you want to try Kerouac, read San Francisco Blues or one of his other books of poems instead.
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Summary: Expressed Beats great, easy read, excellently written
Review: Well written book into the life of a man who is searching for identity in a country of conformist and radicalists. He truly embodies the character and easy read.
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Summary: "On The Road" isn't a book, but a dream made into a reality.
Review: The reality of it is this: Being care-free and having the actuall guts to go for it is something we all wish we had. Sal and Dean are two guys that live life to the fullest and give a perfect example of what "the good life is." Material possesions aren't everything, but being free-spirited and experiancing adventure after adventure is. This book represents a dream that everyone of us have deep down inside. The dream to be truely free and adventuris. This book deserves 100 stars instead of only five.
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Summary: It Sucked
Review: it really sucke
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Summary: A fantastic trip of two free spirited men, learning of life.
Review: On the Road is a fantastic trip into the lives of two young men looking for meaning in the world. They search for what life is about, they aren't concerned with the evils of society, they just live life. They experience more on in a short time than most will in their entire lives. It really makes you want to pack up and go. Simple and Fantastic.
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Summary: Simply Stunning
Review: Start with the road trip, an American institution linked in our minds with youth, freedom, coming of age, and the joy and spontaneity of being out on the road without rules or deadlines. Add to that the forefathers and mothers of the Beat Generation-not the Beatniks later so vilified by their idols. Swirl in spirituality, drugs, frantic love, and frantic living-not violence, never violence-and the resulting mass seems almost like unmolded clay: there's a potential for greatness though unrealized. But removing the dross, the gray outside, there is within a beautiful gem, treasure to be found, a book, On the Road by Jack Kerouac.
Though "...the road is life," only about half to three-fourths of the book actually occurs on the road. The book focuses for the most part on Sal Paradise, his friend and inspiring force, Dean Moriarty, and their various relationships with various people from coast to coast. They love to hitchhike, have an affinity for hobos, spend a lot of time trying to "make" girls, and are constantly running from one wild, spiritual, improbable situation to the next with little accountability and few regrets. They're blown away by jazz, are constantly in search of that almost unreachable "IT," and tea to them doesn't mean the same thing as tea to me (some drugs have obscure slang names-who knew). One scary, or intriguing, thing to think about for those who've read the book already is that Kerouac himself once wrote in a letter about the book, "Every word of the story is true."
Though I liked this book, I found within myself conflicting feelings about the story and characters. The practical side of me, some might say the nagging side, wonders if these people have parents or anything even remotely resembling a sense of responsibility for their actions or their consequences, because as far as I can tell, they don't. But there is another side of me that screams, "Amen, hallelujah, I want to do that when I grow up or at least before the week is out." There is something extremely refreshing and inspiring about the very freedom that Sal and Dean have. I am jealous of their ability to be able to leave their homes and jobs wherever they have settled in the county and go out and hitchhike thousands of miles away from stability into uncertainty. While some of the parts about life on the road are scary and ill advised, it seems like a great deal of fun and the adventure of a lifetime. Kerouac utilizes prose in his writing, imagination in his words, and profound insight spilling from the pages and his soul into the readers and their souls. It's about obsessions, abuse, depression, the absolute joy of friendship, moving, thinking, learning, manics, and life-living to the utmost, loving the living. It's life.
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Summary: ...and how did the story end?
Review: This book should come complete with a photo of Kerouac as he was at the end of his personal road: a swollen, hateful drunk living at home with his mother. Then his cirrhotic liver shut down and he died. Know it well, ye who pass here.
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Summary: Unmistakably Charming and Mind Captivating
Review: Once I picked this book up I was not able to put it back down until I had read the whole book from cover to cover. Jack Kerouac wrote very well about the beatnik generation. He was able to keep the readers attention telling of his journeys and expeditions. He unravelled his story extremely well. This is an excellent book to pass on to generations to come.
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