The Dharma Bums (Hardcover) by Jack Kerouac

from bookworm12

This thinly veiled account of Kerouac's travels and spiritual awakening takes place after the events in On the Road. I couldn't help but feel like Kerouac was full of crap through much of this book. He talks about the poor, stupid people who spend their lives working, trapped in one place becau...

from LeahMo

I first read this book three years ago, and Jackie's lovely musing recently inspired me to re-read it for Roof Beam Reader's The Beats of Summer event! The Dharma Bums is a novel about Japhy and Ray, a pair of Zen Lunatics with different approaches to their Buddhism. While Japhy is wild and joyfu...

from patl

This is my second Kerouac, after On the Road many years back, and my first in audiobook form. It might be the best way to hear Kerouac's beat poetry in the prose, to hear them spoken:"... All alone and free in the soft sands of the beach by the sigh of the sea... "and so many of those two-word pi...

from jculkin

Two lines in this book sum up Jack. In a vision near the end, he is told "You are empowered to remind people that they are utterly free". In the same paragraph he says to himself "Poor Jack, his day is so sorrowful and worried, his reasons are so ephemeral, it's such a haunted and pitiful thing t...

from Robert_R._Mitchell

Rereading the Dharma Bums after probably a ten-year hiatus, I am struck by how foreign the beatniks seem to us today and how that impression must have been magnified tenfold for the Leave It To Beaver folks whom we are told ran the country back in the fifties. Then again Ray, Kerouac's protagonis...