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(More customer reviews)Here's a story kiddies, please bear with me:
Years ago I was a struggling, naive graduate student in English at a major southern university. Like a fool, I decided to write a master's thesis on Charles Bukowski. The department chair stuck me with a professor who was supposedly the resident expert on contemporary American literature. From our first conversation it was clear that the man not only had no respect for Buk, but hated his work and hated the very notion that anyone would want to do graduate level work on him. He dismissed the idea with a sniff, saying, "He's marginal and unworthy. No one has written a book on him." I am sad to report that I let the bastard get the better of me. The thesis went unwritten.
Well, that was a decade ago and since then there have been several very fine books written about Bukowski. Three excellent volumes come readily to mind: Neeli Cherkovski's seminal biography, "Bukowski: A Life"; Gay Brewer's Twayne volume, "Charles Bukowski"; and Russell Harrison's "Against the American Grain." All are top notch in their own way.
Now we have Howard Sounes' worthy addition to this list, "Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life." This new biography works well as a compliment to Cherkovski's more intimate work (Neeli and Hank were good friends and the closeness of their relationship informs every page of the text). Sounes' book is more flamboyant, to be sure, and paints Bukowski in darker colors than does Cherkovski's. Both portraits are quite valuable and, even more important, both are very good reads.
I'm still waiting, though, for the definitive Bukowski biography to emerge, a book that combines a true scholar's rigor with a novelist's eye for detail. Maybe some new English professor or graduate student coming up will grab for the brass ring. I can't help but think that our universities will finally forget their snobbery and small brained prejudices and hop on the Bukowski bandwagon.
What I would love to see published is a book that encompasses the pictures painted by Sounes, Cherkovski, Brewer and Harrison, with added chunks of personal grace and style thrown in by this to-be-named biographer. It's bound to happen some day because Bukowski's legacy is simply too daunting, too great to be ignored.
In the meantime, I recommend this book and all of the others I named above. There are other fine volumes on Buk out there, too. Go find them all and read them right away. You'll learn lots of cool stuff and be the life of your next cocktail party!
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