This book is the best reason I can think of for anyone ever learning to read. I've spent most of it with my mouth - metaphorically - hanging open, and my heart perpetually glowing and breaking along with Kerouac's various and numerous highs and lows. Can you be in love with someone who died years before you were even a twinkle in the eye of the universe? I think so. This is not On the Road, and On the Road is nothing by comparison. That is, if there can be any other piece of writing that could e [...]

“My life is a vast and insane legend reaching everywhere without beginning or ending, like the Void – like Samsara – A thousand memories come like tics all day perturbing my vital mind with almost muscular spasms of clarity and recall…”Solitude isn’t for Jack Kerouac – alone on the mountain peak he is tortured and intimidated by loneliness and gets bored with it.“…the vision of the freedom of eternity which I saw and which all wilderness hermitage saints have seen, is of little [...]

Desolation Angels starts where Kerouac left us at the end of The Dharma Bums. On Desolation Peak. Although the two books kind of flow into each other you will notice that Kerouac has changed. After the thrilling and fervid On The Road he became more quiet and meditative. He still has that excitement for life and experience and that somehow never ending urge to be on the road and hang out with his old Beat buddies but eventually he can't identify with the spirit of the so called Beat Generation a [...]

Of the many Beat writers, Burroughs and Kerouac are the two who I’ve read the most and who’s writing has had the most impact on me. Of the two, I like Burroughs’ writing more but find I identify more with Kerouac’s.The first Kerouac book I read was On The Road. I was in college and I was in Spokane in the early morning waiting for a bus to take me home to Cheney. I read the entire book waiting for that bus, which tells you I was way into it and that the busses In Spokane were few and far [...]

My favourite Kerouac book so far. If there is a continuum of idealism, which starts from 'On the Road' and on through 'The Dharma Bums', it is at this book (which follows on from 'The Dharma Bums') that the cracks are really beginning to appear in Jack Kerouac's experience.Yet to put it so simply feels like a crude summing up of what Jack Kerouac was really about. His ability to capture the highs, the lows, the humor and the horror of life is nothing short of inspiring. And who am I, really, to [...]

While I truly loved On the Road, I was pleasantly surprised when I read Dharma Bums and found it to be an even better book. However, I found Desolation Angels somewhat of a disappointmentThe book starts with his time as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak in the North Cascade, I've learned that this section of the book was mainly taken from the journals he wrote at the time--much of it deals with his musings on Buddhism and his life-and I found that part to be somewhat flat.More interesting was hi [...]

Another excellent chapter in his life, with many great moments. Geographically wide-ranging, from the isolation of Desolation Peak in Washington state to lively San Fran, to the slums and mescal of Mexico City, back to friends and new lovers in NY City, then to Tangiers with morphine-addicted Burroughs and his new book "Nude Supper", haha, to LA by bus with his mother, and finally to Florida to rest his weary tired soul. Definitely felt the desolation throughout this book, over and over he talks [...]

I, like many others, found Desolation Angels after reading On The Road. If you're expecting this to be an off-shoot of On The Road, you'd be wrong.This book is a journey into the mind of Kerouac. Some call him genius, some madman, but I don't think you can truly define him in any one catagory.This book is no easy task. It takes a lot of thinking and a lot of patience to get through, but it's well worth the effort in the end.

Forget On The Road- this is Kerouac at his best. Combining the spiritual philosophies of the Dharma Bums, the road and parties and seeking of On The Road and the desolation and isolation of the human spirit in the abyss of nature of Big Sur. To me, this is Jack's most accessible and balanced writing, not only for the content, but also for his lyrical prose being at its finest. Genius!

ON THE ROADwith Mom This book may come as a real shock to those whom have a preconcieved notion about what the "Beats" were all about, and it may also be a shock for those more familiar with the jubilant ecstatic life affirmations of On The Road or even The Dharma Bums. In this book Jack goes on the road (with Mom), has sex with a fourteen year old mexican prostitute, meets up with a Neal (Cody) whom is a far fly from his On the Road days and is tied down with a wife + three kids and a job, meet [...]

Desolation Angels is heaven and hell and the world and America and the Void and his Mom. Kerouac/Duluoz is a despicable, noble, earnest, loving, whiny, brilliant, loyal, weak, irreplaceable, insane jazz poet. As a preamble, listen to Bob Dylan’s Desolation Row and realize how he creates surprisingly linear beauty tangentially, and then crank up the random-o-meter one hundred times for Kerouac. One thousand preliminarily random images turn into a masterful Pointillist painting in prose. Bebop i [...]

Jack-EEE Duluoz climbs the mountain, and comes down (p. 113):"I go all the way down to First Avenue . . . I realize it's Friday Night all over America, in New York it's just ten o'clock and the fight's started in the Garden and longshoremen in North River bars are all watching the fight and drinking 20 beers apiece, and Sams are sitting in the front row . . . while I spent all summer pacing and praying in mountaintops, of rock and snow, of lost birds and bears, these people've been sucking on ci [...]

Boy, I really enjoyed this book, even if not a great work of art. For me reading later Kerouac is like a great conversation with a really thoughtful and interesting, if somewhat mixed-up friend. I bought this for .50 at the Friends of Library Booksale, lost it for about two months, and spent many pleasurable hours on my front porch reading the almost 400 pages this spring, summer and fall. I'm feeling kind of melancholy that I'm finished and don't have Jack to visit with anymore. Goodbye Jack. M [...]

I tried getting into this but wow, this is horrible and I dont understand why so many give it great reviews.His style is extremely awkward, and the mini-rants(for lack of better term) are pointless. I could not get past page 5.

I can't get into this, the writing style is too tedious. Disappointing. I loved The Dharma Bums, Lonesome Traveller, Big Sur, On The Road, and others, back in my younger days.I'll put this to the side, maybe I'll return to it later. I had already started reading Desolation Angels when I read the first few pages of Going Rogue by Sarah Palin just to see what it's like, and it initially intrigued me as they were surprisingly similar in content i.e. - wilderness, and the style of flat writing focus [...]

I absolutely loved this book. Why? Mostly because I´ve always been a fan of Kerouacs writing style, his sincerely and progress as a writer as well as a human beeing. While some might argue that in his later year he became a bitter alcoholic one must say that it never affected his writing in a negative way. This is not On The Road, it´s darker and grittier but that may be exactly why I liked it so much.

I have read this book a couple of times before. I started it seeking location of Olivia's quote. I still have not found that quote, but kept reading the book.I have read many of Keouac's books. He was, at one time right up with Ernest Hemingway in my major arcana. But, Jack K became too depressing for me. The sadness and depression became unbearable. I just could not handle all that misery on top of his personal story. His life was just as miserable and hopeless and the loops of despair that at [...]

I don't know if I'm outgrowing Kerouac, but I definitely got that feeling when I started this book. There's something lacking in exurberance, like Kerouac's winding down. Solitude Vs Wildness atop Mt Desolation Kerouac enjoys the peace & solitude but as soon as he's back into the fold of Cassady-Cody, Ginsberg-Irwin, Corso-Raphael, Orlovsky-Simon & Burroughs-Bull; he's soon back to his old hoboing, drunken, womanizing ways (which like his other books makes for some exicitng writing) but [...]

Desolation Angels contains everything that you've come to expect from Kerouac, from the stream-of-consciousness jazz-like rhythm of his beatnik writing to the way that he chronicles the lives of himself and his friends in 1950s America.The book begins with a pensive Kerouac atop a mountain, Jack's record of a long, lonely summer spent fire-watching. After this period of desolation, he returns to the bright lights of the big cities to meet up with his friends, many of whom were high-profile liter [...]

This book was unique among Keruoac books I've read. It seemed like it was cobbled together by editors in a hurry to sell Keruoac in his post-On the Road fame. It reads as three or four different book projects thrown together into a rather erratic timeline. One: in the Pacific Northwest in solitude, written much more in the style of Big Sur or Dharma Bums spontaneous poetry; Two: shenanigans in San Fransisco with fellow Beats; Three: off in Mexico City (at which point he includes self-reference t [...]

The thing to admire about Jack Kerouac is that he was smart enough to disguise the fact that he was an idiot, in his books at least, and he didn’t do that. This is not to deny that his writings are streaked through with layers of pretentious dispensations lathered upon his fictional self and his thinly disguised friends and literary contemporaries. Starting with its title, Desolation Angels is veined with bold assertions of eternal sacred significance for Kerouac’s book-famous crew of basic [...]

Certainly not the excitable, lust-for-life Kerouac of On The Road and his earlier days, but still a very recognizably Kerouacian stream of thought. Originally a double novel, the first section is based on his time spent on fire watch upon Desolation Peak and the metaphysical rambles that run through the mind during 60+ days of isolation and solitude. The following section is then Jack's stories of returning to the world and his friends after his brush with the Void. In this section, in this end- [...]

It was all downhill after the beautiful title save for some sporadic flashes of poignancy I was leery of picking up this late-career work of Kerouac's, coming at a point when his writing had saturated the market and booze had flooded his talent. My worst fears were confirmed: this is an incoherent mess. He primes us for tedium by shamelessly recycling The Dharma Bums for the first 70 odd pages, then rambles his way through an endless procession of tired, desultory nonsense. It has none of the sw [...]

Kerouac's best, IMO.

Probably one of the more intention looks into Jack's mind. A must read for any Kerouac enthusiast, just don't keep the gun loaded.

This book rocks the fucking cock.

This was my year-long "poetry" read for this year, even though it's more an autobiography than actual poetry.Jack Kerouac once spent a summer at a forest lookout in the North Cascades: Desolation Peak, just across Ross Lake from the North Cascades Hiway. he wrote about his experience and the months that followed as he dealt with his burgeoning fame, his struggles with spirituality and his life as an Icon of the Beat Poets.I was disappointed that Kerouac had nothing very good or interesting to sa [...]

Don't get me wrong, I love Jack's writing and describing of America and Jazz and all his trips. He is a great writer and so honest in this big book confessing his soul but all this Buddhist non-sense, all this unnecessary existentialism even to life's good things and at times his patriarchal opinions about how all women must be like his mother, (Jesus! That woman was so devoted to chores her whole life that at Cali she was scared of the bathtub and the big mountains, you kiddin' Jack?) all that [...]

I think Kerouac's style is best enjoyed in smaller doses, this was at times a bit heavy. I liked the writing more when he is in solitude, when the friends come it all gets out of control, just pages of non-sense dialoque. (I should really start writing these reviews in my native tongue) But there are gems lying amidst the rubble: ". diving the into the night of the self and becoming obsessed with one's own Guardian Angel"" the warm lips against warm necks in beds all over the world trying to get [...]

В качестве дисклеймера в начале книги стоит следующее: "В книге принята пунктуация, отличающаяся от норм русского языка, но соответствующая авторскому стилю". Однако, товарищ Немцов не упомянул, что построение фраз в его переводе также соответствует скорее американскому а [...]