Rating: 
Summary: Get into Bukowski
Review: If you know what's bad for you, but you still like it anyway, read this book. Charles Bukowski is more myth than man. Was he the alcoholic, mysogynist Henry Chinaski? This novel blurs the line between autobiography and fiction, its plain language makes it a genuine page-turner. This is a great first book to buy if you want to know more about Bukowski.
Rating:
Summary: beautiful words about terrible things...
Review: Pick this book up and you will not be able to put it down. The story of a boy's upbringing held hostage by the hard hands and angry mouth of his father. Bukowski was the ultimate outsider, emotionally and physcially separated from world, a black-eyed prey who learns to fight back with scrapped knuckles and sharp words, all captured here for your reading enjoyment and emotional enlightment. Reading this book is a one-two punch to the head, wonderfully enchanting prose that makes you appreciate how much you have given as compared to the society's discards and a lesson on how to breath words into living sentences. His words flow like melted bitter-sweet chocolate. Bukowski is authentic and gifted -- put his books next to Hemingway on your bookshelves. (check out his poetry.)
Rating:
Summary: I never knew that ugly could be so beautiful.
Review: What can I say, this book is brilliant. I would recommend this as a starting point for anyone getting into Bukowski. I read Betting On The Muse first, and I couldn't quite appreciate his poetry until after I'd read this. Hank Chinaski is the embodiment of everyman's underbelly. Sometimes raunchy and inappropriate, other times excruciating and vulnerable, but always completely honest. This one should be required reading for all of mankind.
Rating:
Summary: Great writing
Review: Bukowski has really written an amazing novel. This being the first novel by him i've read I was truly blown away.
He dosn't just write about living in hell, but as being the lowest creature of hell, his rejection throughout childhood and his rejection of others are shown in the backdrop of this harsh environment.
I love the chapter when he is alone in bed and there appears the devil, 'god had forsaken you'.
His anger for the world as a child of depression was written beautifully, blunt and brutal. I love the way he begins as this innocent child, inquisitive and still rather happy. As he grows and as the pages get turned his language changes. He becomes angrier, although his quiet stoic demeanour is still prevalent.
I actually connected with Henry on many levels. Buk has written in a manner in which any disenfranchised adolescent could understand. His distaste for the way people try to portray themselves and hate for the 9-5 life are things I can understand.
Rating: 
Summary: Didn't move me.
Review: I had read Charles Bukowski's poetry first, and was extremely impressed by his abilities as a writer. This was the first of his novels that I read.While the writing style is good and the plot moves you along, one of the things that struck me most was how meaningless the story was. It does nothing to inspire or to teach. It is simply a portrait of a man who moves from one fist fight to the next - and is usually the one who starts the fight because he doesn't have enough depth of character to understand himself or other people. It's a portrait of a man who does NOT rise above his surroundings. He hates those surroundings, and doesn't embrace them so much as hold them up as a testament to his pain, like a child dramatically nursing a wound that some other child inflicted, long past the time it really hurts. The mood is stark and hopeless. The writing style is sharp and brief. There are no beautiful poetic interludes, or any evidence that he's a poet. It's merely the diary of a misanthrope, a misogynist and a hopeless drunk. Reading about his life is like watching someone say, "So there," after driving his car into a utility pole. His female characters are two-dimensional - a problem many male writers have because they don't entirely realize that anyone is "in there". He refers to them all as "snatches" and "c**ts". He can't have them because he isn't attractive enough, and he longs after them, NOT because he likes them, but because he merely wants them. When I was done reading, I wondered what I was supposed to have taken away from it. Was it just a snapshot of a life and an attitude that makes the reader recoil? The point was NOT that he rose above anything despite desperate circumstances, because he let his circumstances win. Was his point that we can't ever understand his genius because of his unique and noble suffering? That we should understand that he could do nothing to prevent his wasted life? Sure he could. His abusive father and his weak (and poorly developed as a character) mother give him an unhappy home, but he doesn't describe anything that would have been insurmountable. I did not find a large soul behind the words in this book. I found a small one. I found a man who is petty, and spiteful and weak. Maybe THAT was his point: that someone who isn't much can still find a publisher and convince people to read books about his less-than-noble life and bad attitude.
Rating:
Summary: Great Understanding of Bukowski's Childhood
Review: Charles Bukowski was most certainly an interesting man with an interesting childhood. This book is an autobiography covering Bukowski's life from the age of two up to twenty-one. Buk never goes far enough to show how John Fante's book Ask the Dust affected him. This is probably because Fante's book had such an impact on Buk's life and made him want to be a writer. (After reading Ask the Dust, one can plainly see the effect Fante had on Bukowski, as the vain of writing is similar.) Everything up to the discovery of Fante is explained in not vivid detail, but enough detail to make it believable, as Buk concentrates more on his characters than the scenery. I found that it made the characters more lively, more developed. Had Bukowski concentrated on the scenery and other minor things as well, it would have detracted from the feeling and the flow of the novel. Everything is fast-paced, and more description would have slowed it down. In some way or another, we can all relate to Bukowski's life. Some of us have had the cruel and overbearing father (When Bukowski would mow the lawn, his father would get on his hands and knees to make sure every blade of grass was cut; if not, the young Buk would get a beating.) Some of us have had the experience of looking up a girl's skirt (Bukowski sees his at an Air Show; he ducks under a grandstand and looks up.) And still some of us have had terrible acne (Bukowski had it so bad that he had to go to the hospital to have the boils burnt off his face and back.) Bukowski's life seems like several short stories tied together, but the whole work flows from one chapter to the next. I recommend this book to anyone who wants to know about Bukowski's childhood or who just wants to see how Bukowski got to become the interesting character that he was. Like his other books, this one is funny... in its own odd sort of way.
Rating:
Summary: tragic +funny=wonderful
Review: I guess it all stands to this with Bukowski, can you find humor associated with drinking? And do you mind something funny mixed with something tragic? If you can, then this author will please you.
He never battled with drinking, he loved it. He wrote some beautiful poetry and entertaining autobiographical novels. The novels based on his life go from birth to end as follows, HAM ON RYE, FACTOTUM, POST OFFICE, WOMEN, HOLLYWOOD. This book is from his birth until the age around 21.
I would not recommend this book to my mother, because she finds alcoholism a disease and very tragic. I also do sometimes find it tragic, but at times find it funny to follow the exploites of a gifted drunken bum. I have read most of his books many times.
Rating:
Summary: Words laced in anquish and drenched in alcohol
Review: Bukowski is the type of writer who invites you out for
a drink to his favorite bar and the next thing that you
know it's two years later, your swimming in your own vomit
and and living in a dive hotel right out of one of your
very worst nightmares. But, he sure can write. Compare
this book to Down and Out in Paris and London by Orwell.
Why is it that Bukowski is not recognized for what he was:
a great American poet and purveyor of folklore
chronicling the exploits of society's eternal misfits?
Rating:
Summary: An American Masterpiece
Review: Do you enjoy great writing? Take Ham on Rye, open any chapter at random and read the first paragraph. . . Bukowski is Hemingway with a sense of humor; J.D Salinger minus the pretensiousness. O'Henry minus the cuteness portion. While he lived he aroused animosity from other authors. Truman Capote was quoted as saying "He just typewrites". For his part he liked Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, John Fante, Celine and a few others whom he felt were speaking the truth as they saw it and lived it. "Everyone else just seemed to be playing tricks with words". No kidding.
Bukowski valued honesty in writing above all, and it doesn't get more honest than "Ham On Rye." I wish we could all "just typewrite" as well.
Rating:
Summary: BUK WILL LIVE FOREVER
Review: any time i feel really crappy, i crank out a bukowski book. his writing is subtle in its greatness and who can't help but laugh at that attitude. don't just read this one. read them all.
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