*Partial spoilers ahead*

Oh dear, oh dear. Despite editor Seymour Krim's spirited defense of the Beat movement in his introduction to this wide-ranging sampler (stories, poems, essays, and excerpts of novels and dramatic works), what The Beats actually demonstrates is that most of these folks just couldn't write very well. Granted, this stuff must have felt cathartic and even revolutionary at the time, and there's validity to any kind of art--no matter how flawed--that shakes people out of their apathy, but as readable literature it just doesn't hold up. There are two pretty good stories (Hubert Selby's "Double Feature," about a couple of essentially harmless young guys who create trouble for themselves when they get drunk in the balcony of a movie theater, and Anatole Broyard's stark, euthanasia-themed "The Choice"); the rest of the fiction is a mess. It's a testament to Krim's perceptiveness that he included a piece called "The Know-Nothing Bohemians" by neoconservative essayist Norman Podhoretz. While Podhoretz strikes an almost ludicrously antagonistic tone (think Joe Friday lecturing a bunch of hapless hippie kids on Dragnet), he does have a point about Jack Kerouac's disdain for clear expression, and Krim realized that. ( )

Great out of print anthology including material critical of beats and beat culture that really give a feel of what non-conformists and uncoventional thinkers faced in this era.