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Rating: 
Summary: ok! but lots of repetition
Review: I lived at number nine rue Git-le-Coeur from 1955 until 1958 and visited there often until 1960 and knew most of the people mentioned in the book. I was an ex-Korean War Vet studying on the G.I. Bill as were thousands of "Americans in Paris" in the 50,s. I can attest that most of the events related are accurate. The Hotel was special because of the freedom the owner granted us: cooking in our rooms, decorating them, allowing overnight guests, etc.) I believe it was the Hotel that helped form the "Beats" rather then the other way around since it was a creative beehive before they got there. My main argument with the book is the insistance of the hotel as being sordid, rat-ridden and dirty. This was not true. I never saw a four-legged rat there and the only roaches were the cannibis kind. The rooms were swept and mopped daily. It was a great place to be even before the "Beats" arrived and should not be defamed by exaggeration at the expense of the wonderful blue haired MadameRachou who owned it and took care of us, her Americains.
Rating:
Summary: L'hotel Maynard G K
Review: Like, baby, I am not a big fan of the beats, dig? I was too young for it - it was dead by the time I was aware of it. And in hindsight it seems so self-indulgent. But. This book is really great. I lived in Paris for a spell, not far from said hotel (though it was long gone) and this is wonderfully interesting chronicle of ex pat life in Paris during the late 50s, early 60s, a bunch of fabulously interesting characters - reminiscent of Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London (or whatever it was called) which was pretty darn clever (and if you like this, you have to read that.)
Rating:
Summary: L'hotel Maynard G K
Review: Like, baby, I am not a big fan of the beats, dig? I was too young for it - it was dead by the time I was aware of it. And in hindsight it seems so self-indulgent. But. This book is really great. I lived in Paris for a spell, not far from said hotel (though it was long gone) and this is wonderfully interesting chronicle of ex pat life in Paris during the late 50s, early 60s, a bunch of fabulously interesting characters - reminiscent of Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London (or whatever it was called) which was pretty darn clever (and if you like this, you have to read that.)
Rating: 
Summary: A five-star Hotel.
Review: Miles' book succeeds in answering the question, "What is Beat?" During the years 1958 to 1963, the residents of Nine, Rue Git-le-Coeur were marching to a different beat in Paris. While Camus, Sartre, Beckett, and Simone de Beauvoire were exploring existentialism in nearby cafes (p. 66), the Beats, including Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, and Brion Gysin were rooming at "The Beat Hotel," engaged in a "sustained burst of creative activity equal to that they had achieved recently in San Francisco" (p. 18). To escape post-WWII "conformism and Puritanism" (p. 5) in the U.S., they travelled to Paris, establishing themselves among the 70 residents of the 42-room Hotel, making it "a micro-climate of their own creation, self-referential and hermetic. It was an ecosystem that fell within the emerging drug culture, with its background in jazz and the avante-garde, its roots firmly planted in the bohemian tradition" (p. 65). Or, in Ginsberg's words, the Hotel was a "big communal love-brain." It was "the right time, the right place, and the right people meeting there together," Brion Gysin recalls. "There were lots of experimental things going on" (p. 158). "Experimental things," indeed. The Beat Hotel was the international house of bohemia (p. 1), synonymous with sex, drugs and poetry: unconventional sex (p. 224); "massive drug use" (p. 241), including experimentation with hashish, marijuana, diosan, codeine, morphine, and heroin; and nontraditional verse. Considering Miles' detailed account of the activities at The Beat Hotel, it is not surprising that in 1961 J. Edgar Hoover declared beatniks a threat to American security (p. 216). This book also shows that for Ginsberg, "the Beat lifestyle was not a pose; for him it was the only life that made any sense, it was the only life possible" (p. 54). Miles gains access to The Beat Hotel through diaries, letters, and his own interviews with Ginsberg and Burroughs, among others. His return to The Beat Hotel may not be for everyone. But for those readers interested in the Beat movement, I recommend visiting Miles' five-star HOTEL. G. Merritt
Rating:
Summary: A great introduction to the beats
Review: Perhaps 9, rue Git-le-Coeur will never be one of those addresses that everyone immediately recognizes. Yet, for a brief period of time, it was home to Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Peter Orlovsky, Brian Gysin, and was infamously known as The Beat Hotel. "The Beat Hotel" serves as an extended biographical sketch, presenting detailed glimpses into the histories of these artists - Burroughs' accidental shooting of his wife, his intense love affair with Ian Sommerville, Ginsberg's problematic relationship with his mentally ill mother, the "Howl" obscenity trials, his affairs with Burroughs, Kerouac and Orlavsky. What results is an often frank, always engaging depiction of the drugged out, free-loving world that produced such classic as Burroughs' "Naked Lunch" and Ginsberg's "Kaddish." It's to the author's credit that he achieves and exceeds his goal of increasing the reader's appreciation of these often neglected rebel artists.
Rating:
Summary: A great introduction to the beats
Review: Perhaps 9, rue Git-le-Coeur will never be one of those addresses that everyone immediately recognizes. Yet, for a brief period of time, it was home to Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Peter Orlovsky, Brian Gysin, and was infamously known as The Beat Hotel. "The Beat Hotel" serves as an extended biographical sketch, presenting detailed glimpses into the histories of these artists - Burroughs' accidental shooting of his wife, his intense love affair with Ian Sommerville, Ginsberg's problematic relationship with his mentally ill mother, the "Howl" obscenity trials, his affairs with Burroughs, Kerouac and Orlavsky. What results is an often frank, always engaging depiction of the drugged out, free-loving world that produced such classic as Burroughs' "Naked Lunch" and Ginsberg's "Kaddish." It's to the author's credit that he achieves and exceeds his goal of increasing the reader's appreciation of these often neglected rebel artists.
Rating:
Summary: Fascinating, Scholarly Sketch of Literary History
Review: The first time I read this book, I turned back over to the first page and read it again. It was that good. I am a huge Burroughs fan, and I learned a new appreciation for Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and Brion Gysin. The grist of this book provides insight into the day-to-day maze of creativity whose epicenter happened to be Post WWII Paris. If you are looking for a fresh, lively, intelligent glimpse into the creative process of Burroughs, Gysin, Corso, Ginsberg and others, this is the book for you.
Rating:
Summary: American Bohemians in Paris
Review: This book is an exploration of the American beat movement during a time period in which most of it major representatives, (not including Kerouac or Gary Snyder) were in Paris at a cheap, nameless hotel located at Rue Git-Le-Coeur, and managed by one Madame Rachon. The hotel was cheap and unsanitary. As long as the guests paid there bills, Madame Rachon allowed them a broad range of freedom in their eccentric lifestyles. The beat hotel was home to the beats as well as to various artists, models, and other bohemians before it closed in 1963. The book includes wonderful bigraphical pictures of Allen Ginsberg, his lover Peter Orlovsky, Gregory Corso, William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin (whose name was unfamiliar to me), and others who stayed at the beat hotel. There is detailed documentation on the activities of each during their stay in the beat hotel with some thought given to why each of these people are important and worth knowing something about. I found the discussion of the day to day life in the hotel the most rewarding part of the book together with a discussion of the relationships of the beats, and other guests, to Olympia Press, which published many of them together with many forgetable works of pornography at that time available only with difficulty in the United States. The book invites reflection on the nature of the beat movement and of the broader movement of bohemianism as it developed in the 19th Century. What were the beats looking for? They were full of unconventional, shocking behavior, particularly in the abuse of drugs and sex as these are documented graphically in the book. They were also serious, had a dedication to literature, a willingness to explore and to come to terms with themselves, a desire for change. The beats were perhaps the most cohesive literary movement 20th Century America has produced and in some cases produced works of merit. Miles's discussion of the work and achievement of these writers encourages one to want to know more. Miles ties the beats in to later developments in pop culture in the 1960s: rock and roll, psychedelics, open sexuality. This to me is claiming too little and too much. It trivializes this movement, I think, to watch the commercialization that took place during the 1960. The beats were isolated, troubled, and searching individuals who, in their productive days, neither had nor wanted the glare of the media. What they did was for themselves and what we make of them is a matter for reflection and not for subsequent 1960s hype. I read Miles biography of Kerouac and was moved by it to read this book. I wasn't disappointed. He is a thoughtful writer on a significant American literary movement.
Rating:
Summary: Sex and Drugs and What it Beat
Review: This book is an important, often funny, illuminating look at an extraordinary period in the history of popular culture. It will be enjoyed by anyone with even the slimmest interest in the history of western literature, art and the moral evolution of western man in the waning years of the second millennium. The squalid Paris rooming house at rue-Git-Le-Coeur didn't have a name. It was just an address to which, because of its arts friendly management and cheap rent, luminaries of the "beat movement" lived and labored between 1957 and 1963. In this book, which takes as its title the colloquial name for Madame Rachou's establishment, Barry Miles continues his informal history of the Beats which, in addition to this offering includes biographies of Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Kerouac. Burroughs and Ginsberg, along with Gregory Corso and Brion Gysin form the fulcrum on which this history turns. If there are any doubts as to the absolute madness of these people, their exuberant embrace of drugs, their extravagant pursuit of sex in all of its variety, their tireless devotion to literature and to each other, this book should lay them to rest. The matter-of-fact description of life at The Beat Hotel is perhaps the greatest strength of this book. There is no question that the sensational and lurid descriptions of the Beats that were fodder for the popular prss in the late 50's and early 60's werre in no way exaggerations. The depiciton of "beatniks" as decadent, impoverished, culturally alienated, drug maniacs seems, after reading this book to be a rather tepid underestimate of just how extreme these cultural icons actually were. But Mr. Miles, in his at once familiar yet detached tone, manages to affirm the facts of "beat" existence while in no way diminishing the people he is describing. The productivity of the principals during this period would be asonishing under any circumstances; under the particular circumstances it seems simply not possible. And yet is was during these years that Naked Lunch found its final form; that Kaddish and The Lion for Real were written; that cut-ups were discovered and explored, and the Dream Machine invented; that The Soft Machine, Nova Express, and The Ticket That Exploded were composed, cut-up, compiled, and first presented to the public. This book, filling as it does a neglected portion of Beat history is an honest, accessible, amusing, and ultimately inspiring chronicle that no one should neglect adding to their collection.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting friends, interesting lives
Review: Throughout 1957 and 1963, members of the Beat movement - primarily Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, and Brion Gysin (and Peter Orlovsky, although he was mostly just along for the ride with Ginsberg) lived (on and off) in an old, low rent hotel in Paris at 9 Git-Le-Rue. During these years they experimented with various literary forms and a multitude of drugs, and created a large body of their work. There were many interesting relationship dynamics going on amongst them all, and most of all this book focuses on those relationships and how they affected each of their respective creative output. The author is in love with both Ginsberg and Burroughs though, so the narrative is somewhat skewed. He seems to have unfavorable reactions to Corso's drinking, for instance, but practically glorifies Burroughs' practice of drug-induced creativity. Still, it's an interesting account of the time spent in Paris.
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