Little Boy
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- 9,99 €
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- 9,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
'A brave man and a brave poet.' Bob Dylan
'This isn't a book: it's a reckoning ... Utterly extraordinary.' Guardian
Little Boy was quite lost. He had no idea who he was or where he had come from . Grown Boy came into his own voice and let loose his word-horde pent-up within him.
From growing up as an orphan in 1920s New York, to serving in the Navy at the D-Day landings in Normandy, to a vagabond life drinking in Parisian cafes, to befriending America's greatest counter-cultural writers, Little Boy has seen it all. This is the story of one man's extraordinary life, and the madness of the century that witnessed it - a story steeped in the exhilarating energy of the Beats, a magical torrent of language that gleams with Walt Whitman's visionary spirit. Above all, this is the literary last will and testament of the iconic publisher and poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti: not only a meditation on his 99 years on the planet, rich in wisdom, emotion, and memories, but an inspiring reflection on what our future might hold.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"I've always been off in my own burb in some suburb of consciousness dreaming away or otherwise goofing off," writes the author of this wonderfully effusive autobiographical prose poem. Ferlinghetti (A Coney Island of the Mind, etc.), who turns 100 this year, offers a lyrical accounting of his life, both the "Me-me-me," with whom he identifies, and "the Other," who is his "shadow self." He also reflects on his private preoccupations with such broader issues as "ecological meltdown," third-world politics, and the "bad breath... of industrial civilization" what he refers to as a way "to find the universal in the particular." He provides vivid memories of his tumultuous childhood, shuttled between family, orphanages, and the foster family he eventually chose for his own, and his wartime experiences as part of the D-Day invasion. Ferlinghetti's prose pulses with the enjambments that energized the beats, whose work he published (famously, Ginsberg's Howl), and it's punctuated with such stunningly evocative metaphors as his recall of himself in Paris in 1948 as "a little like Conrad carrying Coleridge's albatross and the albatross my past" one of the numerous literary allusions that pepper the text. This book is a Proustian celebration of both memory and moments that will delight readers.
