Hank: The Life of Charles Bukowski

Rating:
Summary: A Book or a long list?
Review: I am a huge Bukowski fan but this book seemed to list stories and events in a very akward manner. It had great detail and I learned alot about Buk but if given the chance I would have rather have read 15 essays on Charles Bukowski then have to read this book again.

Rating:
Summary: The Sweetheart Inside the Tough Guy
Review: Neeli Cherkovski is especially well situated to write the biography of his longtime friend and literary compadre, Charles Bukowski. Cherkovski has a true poet's eye and heart and understand that poets function on feeling--succeeding in their poetry by the amount of feeling they can capture, and managing to survive the slings and arrows of everyday life by submerging much of that feeling behind various kinds of soul armor. Perhaps because Bukowski first met Cherkovski as a teenager, he opened himself to his later biographer as he did to few others in his life--let Cherkovski glimpse the real pains and frustrations and desperate need for love that drove him to become the wild man and roughneck of contemporary American poetry. This book has an exceptional insight into Bukowski's creative process--into the black humor, relentless work ethic, indomitable drive for survival, gutsiness, and at times just plain craziness that Bukowski was able to meld into as distinctive a poetic sound as any we've heard in the last century's prosody. This book is highly recommended for anyone who wants to understand what separates real poets from pretenders, and real poetry from the supremely irrelevant verse that clogs up most academic curriculums as the official canon. Above all, in the agonies and ecstasies of Bukowski's life, it shows the price real poets have to pay to do their work.