Choice 评论
This collection of photographs is a redoing of McDarrah's Kerouac and Friends: A Beat Generation Album (1985), which included a series of essays by various hands on the Beat scene, accompanied by many of McDarrah's photos, poorly reproduced and offered in a small format. The present volume rectifies these problems, eliminates the essays, and showcases a wide range of oversized images that demonstrate McDarrah's talent. The focus is Kerouac, Ginsberg, Jones, Corso, and a host of the famous and not-so-famous who made Greenwich Village a mecca for the new bohemia in the 1950s and early 1960s. McDarrah was the staff photographer for The Village Voice, then something of an underground newspaper, and he took his camera to coffee-house poetry readings, parties, taverns, beatnik pads, Washington Square Park, and city streets. Very few of these pictures are posed; instead, McDarrah captures the Beats in impromptu moments as they interact with the city and each other. This impressive and stimulating book should interest any student of American literature and culture. M. H. Begnal; Pennsylvania State University, University Park Campus