A review by nickdleblanc
The Beats: A Graphic History, by Paul M. Buhle

2.0

Harvey Pekar et al are certainly no journalists. Most of the story telling is perfunctory and it reads as if absolutely no research was done. Frankly, that may have been the case, and if so, it’s fairly impressive that the authors remembered all of this. The art is cool throughout, and it’s a nice outline of who the Beats were including some of the cooler people hanging around the outside like Kenneth Patchen and Diane Di Prima. I have a weird relationship with the Beats. I find a lot of their romance and mythologizing to be a bit overblown and annoying. I never really like Kerouac and Ginsberg can be a bit icky for me, even though he was an impressive community organizer. For me, Burroughs’ writing is far and away the best, and I don’t even mean the cut-ups, just in straight writerly terms, his chops were the strongest—which is too bad considering how shitty of a human he seems to have been. But that’s beyond all of this. The book is fine, good to flip through, probably would be a really great read for someone who wants to learn about the Beats. For someone super into the Beats it would be a shallow retread of everything they’ve known forever. For me, someone who doesn’t care all that much about them with only a passing interest in some of the authors, it’s ultimately forgettable.