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Summary: I want this book
Review: Can anyone tell me where I can get this book, I have been looking for this book for quite sometime with absoutely no success. E-mail me at inbinder@home.com if you know where I can get a copy of this book.
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Summary: From A Former...
Review: I am a former Heroin addict. Although the author himself does not dive into the horrors of the addiction, he feels the same pain for speed that a Junkie will feel for Heroin. Burroughs, Jr. is a wonderful writer, and I will say even better than his old man. The second book, Kentucky Ham, does tend to fly off of the subject at the end, but his off-the-subject commentary is touching and real, and seems to fit just fine. If you want to understand yer local neighborhood Junkie better, read this book. Oh, hell, read it anyway.
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Summary: A Toutching Story Of A Real Person
Review: I love and have loved these two books by Billy Jr for years. I have read them 3-4 times and swear they only get better w/each re-read. When you finish the last page of Kentucky Ham (having read Speed first and the second book subsequently) you feel like you and Billy had just hung out together for a little while. And it feels like that evey time you read his stuff. How sad that he was indeed "cursed from birth" and had such a short sad life but how intruiging it was!
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Summary: A great book
Review: I love this book and recommend it to everyone. I bought it at an Allen Ginsberg book signing and I had him sign it. What an awesome writer, and how sad these were his only books. Imagine what we've lost. William jr's writing was beautifully poetic and very identifiable. I wanted to find it here to get Xmas presents for all my friends----bah humbug it's not here.
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Summary: Amazing books
Review: I never tire of reading these books and have read them over and over again. This book touches you especially if you have had an addiction to anything like drugs. William Jr can make you laugh and weep in the same chapter. These books leave you with a profound sadness but they stay with you even after you are done reading them. The thing is you are never done because I have returned to them over and over again. This is an honest look into the world of addiction. It's not a pretty picture but it is not a preachy book on the " evils " of drugs. It just describes the author's experience with speed. A terrific read. I know it will touch you as it has touched me. It is a shame that William Jr left us so early.
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Summary: Fascinating work
Review: I was a close friend of Billy Jr. for many years, and knew his father, the immortal William S. Burroughs, when I founded the Santa Cruz Poetry Festival in the 1970's. The son was no mere imitation of the father, though the subject of these books, drug addiction, would lead you toward that conclusion. Billy was one of the saddest, most tragic figures I had ever known, and also one of the kindest, most entertaining and charming. He is testimony to the "offspring of greatness", syndrome: the curse of trying to emulate and duplicate the father. These are remarkable books, perhaps as relevent to the insanity of the 60's and 70's, the self indulgent, self-destructive underbelly of all that hope and optimism and freedom that Naked Lunch and Howl and Dharma Bums had represented to the 50's. Billy Jr. could write, Billy was a human yo-yo, full of pain and rage, resistant to society's conventions and ultimately his own worst enemey. I belive he had two liver transplants before he was 32. He told us on numerous occasions that he was present when his father shot his mother during an infamous, abortive game of "William Tell" in Mexico. I have never been able to verify that, as I never had the courage to ask Wiliam Sr. on the rare occasions I was with him. Anyway, very few writers are inseparable from their work. There was nothing fabricated in either Speed or Kentucky Ham: this is Billy Burroughs, Jr., son of a legend, a modest legend in his own right, and I don't think a study of the 60's would be complete without seeing this dark, painful, resilient, hopeful, despairing, all-too-brief mini-body of work left behind by Billy. It is almost a litmus test for which path you took at a very young age. If life was too painful to be lived, Billy took the right one. I"m not sure that's what he wanted, he just didn't know how to step outside himself for very long. I loved these books, and I loved Billy JR. James Dalessandro, author, Canary In A Coal Mine, Citizen Jane, Bohemian Heart and 1906
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Summary: Better than William S. Sr's junky, but in the same spirit
Review: If you like William S. Sr. stories of the streets of NYC you will really dig, Burroughs Jr's tales of living life as a speed junky. The story is real and reads well. Kentucky Ham is a triumph. Perhaps one of the best under rated books I have ever read.
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Summary: A literary masterpiece from Burroughs Sr.'s only son...
Review: These two novels are powerful, humorous, masterful...I can't say enough good things about them. The characteristic matter-of-fact Burroughs bite is there, but Billy Jr. handles the emotions and hopelessness of his lifestyle with more empathy than his father...a must-read for anyone who is a fan of Burroughs or his brand of drug culture. Even though the novels were written decades ago, it is easy to identify and fall in love with the late Burroughs Jr.
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Summary: one of the best books i've ever read
Review: truly an amazing work of art, the son of william s burroughs tells the tale of his life as a speed-addict. i've read it some times now, and it is still as releasing to read it now as it was the first time. i'm also a fan of his father's work, but i must say that his son really makes burroughs senior's books rather boring and non-animate.especially one sentence touched me: "the tree showed the shape of the winds" oh how right he was
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Summary: deep sadness
Review: Two books by the son of William S. Burroughs. Soul crushing sadness. While the Elder Burroughs' writing has an almost scriptural cadence to it, (Bill Jr, says "Naked Lunch" was transcribed), the Junior Burroughs writing is page after page of unrelenting despair and self-pity; well-written, yes, but Darker-than-Dark...In his afterword to the book the Elder Burroughs' describes his son's writing as illustrative of the Cultural Revolution and Dream that was the 60's. Bill Jr's writing shows the 60's as a nightmare and you may feel fortunate to wake from it after finishing the book. And, as so many "Revolutions" of the 20th century abysmally failed, perhaps this was one more revolution we can thankfully see fizzle and fade. In "Speed" Bill Jr. confidently predicts that the long-hair revolutionaries he sees are gonna shake up the world and never sell out...well... Fascinating book, well-written, haunting and exasperating, important addition for folks who collect the Elder Burroughs stuff. Just don't read this book with any sharp objects nearby...
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