A Blue Hand: The Beats in India

by Deborah Baker

A literary exploration of the Beats' encounter with India in the 1960s, a journey that inspired and influenced generations of Americans and Indians alike.

In 1961, Allen Ginsberg left New York by boat for Bombay, India. He brought with him his troubled lover, Peter Orlovsky, and a plan to meet up with poets Gary Snyder and Joanne Kyger. He left behind not only fellow Beats Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, and William Burroughs, but also the relentless notoriety that followed his publication of Howl, the epic work that branded him the voice of a generation.

Drawing from extensive research in India, undiscovered letters, journals, and memoirs, acclaimed biographer Deborah Baker has woven a many layered literary mystery out of Ginsberg's odyssey. A Blue Hand follows him and his companions as they travel from the ashrams of the Himalayan foothills to Delhi opium dens and the burning pyres of Benares. They encounter an India of charlatans and saints, a country of spectacular beauty and spiritual promise and of devastating poverty and political unease. In Calcutta, Ginsberg discovers a circle of hungry young writers whose outrageousness and genius are uncannily reminiscent of his own past. Finally, Ginsberg searches for Hope Savage, the mysterious and beautiful girl whose path, before she disappeared, had crossed his own in Greenwich Village, San Francisco, and Paris.

In their restless, comic and oftimes tortured search for meaning, the Beats looked to India for answers while India looked to the West. A Blue Hand is the story of their search for God, for love, and for peace in the shadow of the atomic bomb. It is also a story of India-its gods and its poets, its politics and its place in the American imagination.

Genres: Nonfiction, Travel, India, Biography, History

246 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

Deborah Baker was born in Charlottesville and grew up in Virginia, Puerto Rico and New England. She attended the University of Virginia and Cambridge University. Her first biography, written in college, was Making a Farm: The Life of Robert Bly, published by Beacon Press in 1982.

After working a number of years as a book editor and publisher, in 1990 she moved to Calcutta where she wrote In Extremis; The Life of Laura Riding. Published by Grove Press and Hamish Hamilton in the UK, it was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography in 1994. Her third book, A Blue Hand: The Beats in India was published by Penguin Press USA and Penguin India in 2008.

In 2008–2009 she was a Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis C. Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars at The New York Public Library. There she researched and wrote The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism, a narrative account of the life of an American convert to Islam, drawn on letters on deposit in the library’s manuscript division. The Convert, published by Graywolf and Penguin India, was a finalist for the 2011 National Book Award in Non-Fiction.

In August 2018, she published her fifth work of non-fiction, The Last Englishmen: Love, War and the End of Empire.

She has two children and is married to the writer Amitav Ghosh. They divide their time between Brooklyn and Goa.

Reviews

[Mik Hamilton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Baker subtitles this book "The Beats in India". Really, it was about a few beat poets in India. The beats that I knew in India, and I was one of them, did not travel in literary circles or have royalty checks coming from America, but had to live by their own resources. I'm speaking of the road travelers who were in India in the early to mid sixties before the hippies started showing up. Some of them, like 8 Finger Eddie who was by then living in Goa, did become the gurus of the hippies. They were not just Americans but from all over the world. I did enjoy her book because of the descriptions of the India that I saw at that time but what was her obsession with Corso's unrequited love for Hope Savage? Corso didn't even go to India.
She wrote nearly as much about this subject as any other. As for Gary Snyder, he wrote at that same time but I don't think many considered him "Beat". He was more from the San Francisco Renaissance along with the likes of Philip Whalen, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure, etal. It did also make me want to re-read Allen's "India Journals" though.
If you would like to read about my adventures in India, read The Asian Road. authored by me.
https://smile.amazon.com/Asian-Road-W...

[Tinker · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a history of the 15 month sortie by Ginsberg, Orlovsky, Snyder and Kyger to India in the early sixties, with appearances by other beats, particularly an elusive Village character whom Corso loved named Hope Savage. It's a peculiar book. When I first picked it up to read a few paragraphs in the middle I thought, oh no, is this one of those novelized biographies where the author is constantly conjecturing, “she must have been thinking….”? Well, it’s not. It’s novelized all right, it switches scenes and suggests dialogue and inner states, it’s vividly imagined. But Baker seems not to have made anything up. The thoughts of these protagonists regarding their travel experiences are perhaps among the most thoroughly documented in literary history: most of the participants kept journals, even published them; and the unedited originals of these and torrents of relevant letters and other documents from, to and about them crowd university library archives and are available to assiduous researchers. At the back of the book, Baker justifies her text almost phrase by phrase. These notes themselves make for dizzying reading.

But, you are asking, does it work? The puffs on the back are unusually laudatory and by significant figures—perhaps the most telling from Michael Ondaatje, who started his career with similar literary projects, researching the lives of Billy the Kid and Buddy Bolden and then re-imagining them in highly-colored poetic texts. I’m inclined on the whole to agree with the puffs, but I have reservations. The process the author set in motion leads to much detail but less sense of purpose. You could say the thrust of the book is that collision with the reality of India led to maturation of the pilgrims. But the closest thing to a significant dramatic agon is Allen’s decision to throw away some psilocybin. One does put down the book with a strong sense of Baker’s view of these quirky and colorful personalities, her judgment of them in fact, but this is gossip. A question is, is it deep gossip?

Once I got used to it, I did enjoy the stream of language, the writing, found it indeed a “good read.” It doesn’t look like it’s scheduled for paperback; perhaps it’s not been as much of a hit with run-of-the-mill beat generation fans as hoped. The hardback has been remaindered so you can get it cheap. If you have interest in any aspect of the subject matter, you might enjoy this, swinging in an outdoor hammock with lemonade handy.

[Colin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was not a chapter of the Beat saga I was aware of and probably deserves some more light. What stands out here instead of Allen Ginsberg's search for gurus and empty headedness are the stories of Joanne Kyger and Hope Savage.

Kyger, per Baker's retelling of her journals in India, is totally steamrolled by Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, and her husband Gary Snyder, all of whose vanity and bullishness are plain: "At times her life seemed a conspiracy of men talking above her head." She's forced to tiptoe around their egos, is left out of readings, and is represented by her husband when solicited for poems to be published. I'm thankful to have discovered Kyger's poetry even through this story of her spiritual suffocation in India.

Hope Savage's story is equally interesting, though her work as a scholar may be lost to history. Baker admits to not being able to track her down by the end of the book. Gregory Corso gets a lot of airtime in this book as he pines and asks after Hope Savage via letters to Ginsberg.

in general, I think I'm taken with the follies and foibles of Allen Ginsberg more than with his yearnings or questions. For example, in the Epilogue Ginsberg returns to India after his literary celebrity and political activism have fused: "He also wanted to collect more devotional songs; he'd been singing the same kirtans and bhajans, chanting the same Hare Krishna, at readings, be-ins, and protest sit-ins at the Pentagon for some time. He drove all his friends crazy with his chants. During the Chicago riots in 1968 where he had chanted 'Om' for seven hours to calm everyone down, an Indian gentleman had passed him a note telling him his pronunciation was all wrong. So he was going to work on that, too."

[Craig Werner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Weird, quirky, fun book, of interest mostly to people who share my obsession with the beats. I tend to fall back on a definition of the beat generation as "people who knew Allen Ginsberg" and A Blue Hand supports it. Clearly, one of Baker's primary sources was the collection of Ginsberg's Indian Journals, but she cycles out from that, giving extended attention to Gary Snyder and Joanne Kryger, Gregory Corso, Peter Orlovsky and a fascinating set of Bengali poets who the Indian media labelled the "Hungry" or the "Hangry" (hungry and angry) Generation. But the most interesting of the cast is probably Hope Savage, daughter of an affluent South Carolina family, who set out to make her own way, traveling as a single woman through Iran, Afghanistan and who knows where all else. Corso was obsessed with her, but she kept control of her own path. Baker has obviously decided to place her at the spiritual center of the story in something of the way Neil Cassidy haunts the male beat classics On the Road and Howl. I found myself wondering at times whether Savage was real, but I think that's precisely the point. At the end of the book, Baker (who herself expatriated to India and is terrific on the dynamics of the Calcutta literary scene) admits she was unable to track Savage down.

Despite the subtitle which places India in the foreground, almost half of A Blue Hand is a more general introduction to beat culture, a very good one. She captures the combination of serious searching, psychological complication, flat out male misogyny, good humor, and aesthetic vision that make the beats so interesting.

[Goirick Brahmachari · Rating 4 out of 5]

Human beings reach a point from where they can only come back and it is not possible to go further,coz there aint any further
…this book is a classical example of that..
Its paints the path though which 1000s of hipstars, rockstars, poets, Beats and Beatniks kept coming to India in search of a silent solace...a search for the clay wet self.

7 to 8 different stories neatly stitched together- primarily dealing with the beats like Allan,Corso, Peter,Gary and Joan,a bit of Jack and Old Bull,Though Allen was the reason I bought the book,It was Hope Savage, that I fell in love with.The way she went away from everything.such a saint..until she disappears.The story of Ashok fakir is remarkable as well and I really love the way she connects allen and ashok ..Starting with two different stories at two different part of the world and how they meet and inspire one another.

The writers love for her husband and commitment for his culture is inevitable
..the way Bengali culture ,art, ,Gods, bauls,fakirs and poets has been painted, it leaves you wondering and falling in love again with your own roots.

a very well researched book ..recommended for people who have already fallen in love with beats

[Sneha · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was really into the Beats as a teen because it was the only place I saw Indian representation (bc they went to India a lot) and I loved Ginsberg’s poetry. Reading this as an adult made me wonder if they were really artistic greats who gained knowledge and perspective from world travels, or if they were just arrogant white men who got stoned for cheap in a bunch of different countries. Tough call. My prefrontal cortex is also fully developed now, so that could be turning me into a boring old fuddy-duddy with no respect for backpacking or ganja.

[Katalin Koda · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting account of the Beats in India...maybe a little heavy on the Beats and not enough on India for me.. left me a bit thirsty for more, and motivated to write my own India stories.

[Bruce Graham · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great if you are a Beat fan, and want a bit more inside stuff. If you're interested in India, not quite so much. Like Steve Jobs, I too went to India. It was the 'thing' to do. Make the pilgrimage. Like Steve Jobs, I came away a bit disappointed, this book too, may do the same for the 'seeker.' We kept seeking the 'there' there, but it didn't seem to be there.
The author has done a tremendous amount of research and included quite a few Indian participants in the journey of the Beats. Ultimately, the story seemed unfinished.

[S. Miles Lotman · Rating 4 out of 5]

You would have thought that the guy that wrote the legendary poem Howl (“I saw the best minds of my generation...”) and who (along with Jack Kerouac) personified what was perhaps the most important cultural movement in 1950s America would have felt some satisfaction in a life well lived. But Allen Ginsberg, Beatnik genius, was a mess of confusion and anxiety when JFK's New Frontier era began. A born traveler, though always a poet of limited means, Ginsberg's insatiable curiosity for life would take him across the world. Deborah Baker's A Blue Hand is the wonderful story of Ginsberg's sixteen months spent in India in 1961-2. Told in non-linear fashion, the story shifts often, like a moth zigzagging towards a light source, jumping between Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky's rendezvous with Joanne Kyger and Gary Snyder (Jack's hero Jahpy Rhyder in The Dharma Bums), Allen's camaraderie with Calcutta's coffeehouse poets, his desperate search for a guru in Benares, and being stoned out of his mind at the funeral pyres, then rewinding to his teen years, New York, the scene in San Francisco, friends like Kerouac, William Burroughs and Gregory Corso and a femme fatale named Hope Savage flitting into the narrative, backwards and forwards and back again, much like the mind might reconstruct existence on a sleepless night wondering how it all came together, this seemingly random chain of events that is called life.

Ginsberg's spiritual quest begins with his famous Blake vision in 1948. Twenty-two years old, confused by his homosexuality and whether or not he should dedicate his life to poetry or follow the American Way and occupy a real job, he experiences an auditory hallucination of William Blake's voice narrating his poem “Ah Sunflower!” He realizes then that “a poem might open the door to the cosmos” but also that the flip side of a mystical experience is paranoid delusion. Nevertheless, he decides to “never forget, never renege, never deny the sense sublime.”

Thus years later the trip to India. And “tripping” for Ginsberg is a loaded word. It involves drugs: pot, of course, mescaline in Mexico, ayahuasca in Peru, and Allen is conversant with Tim Leary on the social revolution they might engineer with LSD. But tripping for Allen was also the clumsy pratfalls of looking for meaning in foreign lands when one tires of the empty promises of home. Ginsberg was neither the first, nor certainly the last, Westerner coming to India assuming its exotic traditions was the answer to existential dilemmas. After more than a year abroad and no closer to replicating the sublimity of his Blakean vision, Allen is devastated. There is no guru who can nurture in Ginsberg some guidance to a higher enlightened state. Drugs have become “a blind alley” and anyway his friend Gary Snyder, an ascetic disciplined in meditation and koan study, often chastises Allen for even considering drugs could be the means for a breakthrough satori.

“Don't you want to study Zen and lose your ego?” Gary Snyder asked his wife, Joanne Kyger, who famously answered, “What! After all this struggle to obtain one?” This conundrum of mind-body balance-of-power affects many travelers to India, including Allen. However, while worrying and wondering what effect ego might have on mystical truths, Ginsberg finally learns that while he might never rein control over visionary powers, he nevertheless concludes being stuck as Allen Ginsberg isn't the worst. The purpose of the journey evolves-- India is not epiphany or new poetry, so much as acceptance of self, that is a gay, spiritual, sensitive, charismatic, questing, uniquely original Jewish American poet whose words have made many of us feel a little less lonely. Why embrace the Indian deities when William Blake might be his saint? An Indian sadhu tells Allen how he “had spent thirty years waiting for Krishna to appear to him, only to realize himself that it was not Krishna he sought, but the love he inspired.”

And that is the thing about Ginsberg: it is love, self-love, yes, everyone needs that, but more importantly brotherly love, love of Man, true, gentle love-- certainly more than Kerouac or the other Beats, and most other poets, who in trying to interpret God in verse, end up careless of others' feelings. For all his friends' emotional abuse and failure to reciprocate kindness, Allen is always there to give. That quality of goodness becomes evident in his friendships with the Calcutta coffeehouse poets, one of whom he helps leave India for America for a fellowship and whose life is thus transformed. At the heart of the Beats' stormy plans for poetry, revolution, and life, Ginsberg is the center of it all, the guiding light. He is nervous, silly, impressionable, high-strung but also reflective, empathetic, brave and strong, one of those artists who is wise enough to understand the monumental consequences of giving himself wholly over to poetry and does so anyway. We often travel to lose ourselves, to be free (as Thoreau wrote: “to reveal our truest self”) but in the end, coming home, we occasionally realize we were never quite so lost in the first place.

[Melanie]

I am probably 75 pages into this book and I am still terribly confused. I have a passing knowledge of the beats coming into this, but I am still confused about who is who. The style of the writing is overworked, the whole first section is a long introduction without any attempt at cohesiveness, jumping city to city and year to year, flashbacks, flashforwards... Just a horror show so far.

[Leanne · Rating 5 out of 5]

My friend Ted is reading this book now, and I realized I forgot to leave my review here. I think Ted will like the book a lot. It is as quirky and non-standard as the subject matter. NYT review describes the book as a "group portrait of Allen Ginsberg and his bliss-seeking crew during the poet’s 15-month spiritual quest (and bodily adventures) in the land of a zillion mystics early in the decade running from Kennedy through Nixon."

It is brilliant--and so is Ginsberg and his crew.

This is my second biography by Baker. I love her husband Amitav Ghosh's work and wondered if she was influenced by him to write such a novelistic biography? Like her other one, The Convert, she is doing very unique style biography. It is free-style and very playful. She also posits a mystery, which keeps things spicy, about a strange woman they meet in India in places along the road who they all fall in love with. Like the Convert, there are a lot of things that don't work probably. Like the mystery is never solved and her portrait of the artists might be even a bit too playful (many great scenes painted but it doesn't really move)... still I give it 5 stars. It WILL make you want to go back to India.

I read this one on the beach in Ventura over the course of a few very relaxing weeks, spent on that chilly but wonderful beach. The book is perfect to read with a great IPA!

The Convert is also "really out there"... here is my super short review, Ted https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

[Jane E · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting book although the narrative is confusing jumping between as yet unconnected people, sometimes 2 or 3 times on the same page. A portrait of a different time when poetry was a calling, drugs were cheap and India might offer the pathway to a deeper understanding of life. Populated with all the usual beat suspects and definitely worth the read. (Purchased secondhand from an Amazon seller)

[Dana Torrente · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some of this was really solid while other parts of it wandered. It’s kind of how I feel about a lot of these beats historical accounts that sweep across a lot of writers. The accounts on Allen where by far the best and it will certainly give you wanderlust for the ashrams of the 60s. I appreciated the history it provided and it giving me a better view of just how much international experience contributed to best writing.

[Lawrence · Rating 4 out of 5]

Despite what I indicate as my official Goodreads start date, it's been over a year since my excursions into Gary Snyder's poetry inspired me to pick up A Blue Hand. The thrust of the book is to document Beat poets Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky's semi-spiritual 1962-63 voyage to India, at times accompanied by fellow American writers Snyder and Joanne Kyger, but my favorite part of the book was the pre-India beginning, in which my onetime favorite poet Gregory Corso more or less steals the show. After Snyder and Kyger leave India for Japan, too, the continuity of the Ginsberg-focused narrative does begin to (*ahem*) Peter out. But, one of my favorite things about the Beats has always been their intense web of interconnectivity, and A Blue Hand provides that in spades, in the process adding Asoke Sarkar, Hope Savage and Sunil Gangopadhyay among others to my checklist of fascinating people to watch out for. Oh: and seeing as how everyone's stories are, for most of the book at least, so carefully and beautifully interwoven, I might as well go ahead and add Deborah Baker to that list, too.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Much more Ginsberg in India than the Beats, somewhat establishing AG's primacy as Beat guru supreme, with the other--Kerouac, Burroughs, Corso--out there elsewhere in the world as Allen, accompanied by Orlovsky, seeks visions in India.

Whalen & Kyger shoot through like comets, and the book may be at its best when Whalen's relatively settled Zen self and Kyger's female and skeptical outsider (skeptical & outsider in large part because female in the spiritually macho & homosocial world through which Ginsberg moved) show up.

Corso plays a long-distance foil to Allen, never making it to India despite the occasional quasi-hysterical pledge to do so. Burroughs is on a distant cold planet, radioing in dispatches from his own beyond. Kerouac's just out there somewhere in America, soaking in his miserable success & successful misery.

Baker does an outstanding job of weaving together material from correspondence and personal interviews, including a lot of great work with Indian poets with whom Ginsberg & Orlovsky consorted & cavorted. The episodic narrative, with a lot of jumping about in time, works very well. Not just India by any means--great glimpses of NYC, Tangier, Paris, Kyoto & points en route to India.

[Wilfriedhoujebek · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first chapter of this book made me fear the worst: it describes Allen Ginsberg watching himself in the mirror in a way that reminded me of the way an opium-addicted parvenu would transcribe a film scene. Happily the book picks up after that. Baker knows her beat sources and she routinely condenses biographical scenes with precision and an eye for the ridiculousness of the scene. This book is based on written sources and as such a much needed work of synthesis. Ginsberg, Snyder, Kyger, Corso they all come alive here while the spectre of Hope Savage woven though the story is out of necessity the dark heart of this book. Technically this book is well crafted: the story switches between times and places and people in order to show the various trajectories that lead the beats to India and what led their Indian friends to the west. What lets A Blue Hand down is that in the last fifty pages or so seem less the writing seem to untangle as if Baker was unsure where to go and what to say next.
The expected size of the readership for this book appears limited but I devoured this as a fine book on an important period in the evolution of the beats from inner city bohemians to cosmopolitan public intellectuals.

[Alden · Rating 5 out of 5]

The spirit that animates—or at least haunts—Deborah Baker's excellent account of the Beats in India, A Blue Hand, is not the spirit of its main protagonist, the troubled, sweet-natured poet-mystic Allen Ginsberg, but rather an elusive seeker, chanter of Swinburne and one-time girlfriend of poet Gregory Corso, Hope Savage.

Ginsberg left New York for India in the fall of 1961, after months of delay and indecision, propelled by a vision of God he had in a Harlem apartment years earlier. He was met eventually by his lover, Peter Orlovsky, and the pair joined poet Gary Snyder and his then-wife Joanne Kyger for some weeks in exploring India, while Corso (the one truly unlikable figure in this history), remained ambivalently, fearfully at home, and William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac followed other paths. Driven by unknown dreams or demons, Savage had long ago slipped the bonds of her eminent South Carolina family and of Corso and traveled by herself to Iran and Afghanistan. By the time Ginsberg arrived in India, she was already there.

more of my review here:
http://www.bookpage.com/0804bp/nonfic...

[Cody · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not unlike Ondaatje’s *Running in the Family,* *A Blue Hand* renders biography into eloquent fragments that, when assembled, do not paint a complete picture but, rather, gesture at a range of possibilities and impressions. Baker's unwillingness to resolve echoes the philosophies of Hinduism and Buddhism--the very means of thinking and living that at once intrigued, befuddled, and eluded Allen Ginsberg (the western avatar in this saga) throughout his time in the subcontinent.

Perhaps the most significant element of *A Blue Hand* is that it gives a powerful and nuanced voice to some of the “minor characters”—as Joyce Johnson ironically dubbed herself and others—in the Beat saga who inspired, supported, and sacrificed (whether willingly or not) their own well-being and artistic ambitions so that those we now think of as the quintessential Beats could pursue their “calling” unhindered. Unlike so many other texts about the Beats, which focus solely on Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Burroughs, *A Blue Hand* chronicles the experiences of Hope Savage, Joanne Kyger, the Hungryalists and others, finally giving them due credit for their crucial positions in the Beat Generation.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

Horribly depressing, a perfect example of how travel can destroy the mind. Or perhaps it is about how going some place to look for answers is a big mistake; you can only go looking for questions. The book terrified me because it is about what happens when you seek to live your life out of the charity of others. To do this requires a certain sort of blindness which seems to me worse than desperation. I am definitely cut of the "god helps those who help themselves" cloth, as bad as it as I have proven to be. Also, wisdom belongs to the wise. They can give it, but it slips through the fingers of those who beg for it.

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is so rare to read a book on the beat generation in which I learn something new. "A Blue Hand," is full of new stuff, probably because I find Ginsberg's Indian Journals unreadable, and so never have.

This is an affectionate and honest look at the prime players in the beat pantheon, with a special focus on Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Jonanna Kyger, and Gary Snyder - all of whom made it to India, and Gregory Corso, who didn't. Corso does have an unrequited love for the most interesting new character in the saga - Hope Savage. Hope is a mystery girl who becomes the ultimate mysterious figure.

Interesting, entertaining, and a gap filler in the history of the beats

[Hannah · Rating 5 out of 5]

This poetic narrative breathes life into the spiritual searchings of Ginsberg and friends through their American and Indian travels. At times, Baker is tough to follow, as her descriptions of various peoples, encounters and philosophies jumps around from paragraph to paragraph, she does however provide insight to the blending of lives and ideas and the chaotic nature of these iconic Beats. Laced with letters and documentation between the authors, its a literary ride on the road as The Beats meet poets from all walks to influence and help guide their search for religion and the perfect literary muse.

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

The most interesting aspect of this book is the relationship between Gary Snyder & Joanne Kyger. How the Indian poets of Bombay ingratiated themselves to Ginsberg and became some of his first acolytes...
There was not an awful lot I had not heard in some fashion before but the story is well told and -like San Francisco pre-1966- sort of sums up a watershed time in a world that could never be the same, once the protagonists returned stateside.

[Elaine]

This is a short biography of Allan Ginsberg, foussing on the time he spent in India in search of God. Besides providing insight into Ginsberg quest, Baker also helps us understand how that quest can unfold, as it is suggested that god or the sacred is wherever we are able to find that experience. I am a fan of Ginsberg, and this made me appreciate his poetry even more. He provides an opening into that space.

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have no idea why I found this book so fascinating, but I was completely sucked into it. I enjoyed the structure of the book itself, the Beat Poets have always fascinated me for some reason, despite the fact that I've not read any of their works; but I zipped through this intriguing tale of their trip through India (and other parts of the world), as if the book would disappear before I could finish reading it.

[Kathy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I guess I was a bit disappointed by this book. The topic, Allen Ginsberg's time in India sounded fascinating. However, I didn't really get a feel for Ginsberg, and much of the book was devoted to his friends and their travels in India, especially Gary Snyder.

Interesting enough to finish, but not sure I'd recommend it.

[Sanjay · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting, factual and impressively-recreated chronicle of the adventures of Messrs Ginsberg, Orlovsky, Snyder and others in India in 1961 -- but ultimately so crammed with anecdote that it's difficult to maintain a consistent thread. The section dealing with the Beat poets' sojourn in Calcutta is especially fascinating, though.

[Adena · Rating 4 out of 5]

Certainly an interesting perspecive. My only complaint would be that since it's compiled of research, as a reader I don't know if certain terms, phrases and ideas are the authors, or what she has taken from the research.

[Allegra · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quick read with nice detail that helped capture certain personal qualities of the Beats. Most notably Allen Ginsberg who is portrayed as somewhat of an impatient egomaniac wanting a 'quick' enlightenment.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

Deborah Baker's book on the beats in India was a great trip down memory lane for me. i spent 16 months in India and found the book wonderfully evocative. i wasn't very interested in Mr. Ginsberg or his cohorts (with the exception of Gary Snyder and his wife), but in the territory they visited.

[diane · Rating 1 out of 5]

As much as i like the beats, trying to read this book gives me the feeling of confusion that comes with being (uncomfortably) on drugs. While it's being filed on my shelf under the category of 'slowly abandoned', this book was 'quite quickly abandoned'.