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The Dharma Bums (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) | 
| Author: Jack Kerouac
Creators: Jason, Ann Douglas
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Category: Book
List Price: $15.00
Buy New: $8.51
You Save: $6.49 (43%)
New (62) Used (23) from $8.49
Rating:  14 reviews
Sales Rank: 3913
Media: Paperback
Edition: Deluxe
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 224
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.1 x 0.8
ISBN: 0143039601
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780143039600
ASIN: 0143039601
Publication Date: October 31, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Brand New, Perfect Condition, Please allow 4-14 business days for delivery. 100% Money Back Guarantee, Over 1,000,000 customers served.
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Product Description
The Dharma Bums was published one year after On the Road made Jack Kerouac a celebrity and a spokesperson for the Beat Generation. Sparked by his contagious zest for life, the novel relates the adventures of an ebullient group of Beatnik seekers in a freewheeling exploration of Buddhism and the search for Truth.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 9 more reviews...
 Still One of My Favorites December 24, 2008
I read this the first time years and years ago as a teenager. I enjoyed it then and identified easily with the character's strife. As an adult, I see it a new light and more as inspiration for adventure and freedom.
Though Not His Best, MY Favorite November 29, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
My favorite read among Kerouac's work, as I grew up in Berkeley & know a lot of the places he talks about & though Kerouac was a hopeless closet-Catholic the Zen Buddhist stuff at the end is all right. I met Gary Snyder (`Japhy Ryder,' in the novel) once & he told me: `Kerouac was an alcoholic who drank himself to death.' True enough, `but he had more talent than all the rest of you combined,' I replied. The guy's memory was amazing, he could recount conversations, drunken stoned conversations word-for-word years after they'd taken place. So I suppose most of this stuff really did happen. Snyder says so, anyways, though he claims not to remember the sex orgies - convenient. He's a married man & `teaching' at that crappy hillbilly university up in Davis.
Hopefully you don't buy into the Benzedrine-fueled 2-week writing of `On the Road' [Kerouac's best & most important work], because it just ain't true. Homeboy was a writer first, always, & kept a notebook w/ him the whole time he was `on the road' & had most of the writing done before he showed up at his mama's house to put it down for the publishers.
Nowadays, Kerouac's `slumming it' hardly seems gritty or hardcore. Remember these were all Ivy-Leaguers playing around w/ being poor, imagining themselves the `new Rimbauds.' Ten years later, they became the heroes of the hippie movement & look what the hippies gave us: Reagan, over-priced `organic' vegetables, & no-smoking allowed anywhere, even outside in Berkeley, man, outside!) You can't even light up a cig on campus in Berkeley, & Berkeley is a huge campus, man, without risking getting fined by the University cops who seem to be everywhere nowadays. That's straight Fascism, if I've ever heard of it, but back to the book.
I found this one a lot easier to read than `On the Road' which bogs down a little in the middle & more entertaining throughout. The Buddhist rhetoric is half-baked & juvenile but like I said Kerouac never actually bought into the stuff. A good deal of it involves Ginsberg & Snyder; Burroughs is noticeably absent. I think he was either in Mexico shooting his wife or in Tangiers at the time.
A good place to start w/ Kerouac who wrote a lot of books, some of them great, some of them a waste of time, but this one is my favorite. I also prefer Coke to Pepsi.
Rizzob.com
It's Kerouac... October 30, 2008
Stylistically and idealogically its Kerouac through and through. The idea of living a truly free life and one without boundaries truely provoked a lot of thought for me personally. It makes you want to be one of Ray and Japhy's friends; to go find a shack to live in and really exist in what may be the only best way to exist, free of material incarceration. I recommend this book to be read by young adults everywhere. Not all will be opened to a new way of thought and what really matters in this world but some will and it could possibly change their life for the better by not being wrapped around society's focus on material possession as symbols of achievement.
 Don't bother October 10, 2008
1 out of 4 found this review helpful
I tried to give Kerouac a chance to revive himself after reading his most notable mess 'On the Road.' Now I'm thoroughly confused as to why he's so popular.
 It's OK, but ... September 22, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
I didn't get much out of it. It was a nice diversion from everyday life but I kept looking for the point Kerouac was trying to make and it escaped me. I've been reading a lot of hiker, mostly Appalachian Trail, narratives and thought this would be a nice expansion of the group. I went in with little knowledge and no preconceptions about Kerouac and came away with little appreciation of his work. I'm still going to read On The Road and might revisit this review if the mood strikes me. I suppose the lack of structure is a product of his writing style but I was disappointed in how the story just ended. Again, maybe I was looking for more than he was prepared to reveal. Maybe I'm just too set in my ways. Maybe I did get the point and just don't realize it.
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