A Blue Hand

Overview

A literary exploration of the Beats' encounter with India in the 1960s, a journey that inspired and influenced generations of Americans and Indians alike In 1961, Allen Ginsberg left New York by boat for Bombay, India. He brought with him his troubled lover, Peter Orlovsky, and a plan to meet up with poets Gary Snyder and Joanne Kyger. He left behind not only fellow Beats Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, and William Burroughs, but also the relentless notoriety that followed his publication of Howl, the epic work that branded him the voice of a generation. Drawing from extensive research in India, undiscovered letters, journals, and memoirs, acclaimed biographer Deborah Baker has woven a many layered literary mystery out of Ginsberg's odyssey. A Blue Hand follows him and his companions as they travel from the ashrams of the Himalayan foothills to Delhi opium dens and the burning pyres of Benares. They encounter an India of charlatans and saints, a country of spectacular beauty and spiritual promise and of devastating poverty and political unease. In Calcutta, Ginsberg discovers a circle of hungry young writers whose outrageousness and genius are uncannily reminiscent of his own past. Finally, Ginsberg searches for Hope Savage, the mysterious and beautiful girl whose path, before she disappeared, had crossed his own in Greenwich Village, San Francisco, and Paris. In their restless, comic and oftimes tortured search for meaning, the Beats looked to India for answers while India looked to the West. A Blue Hand is the story of their search for God, for love, and for peace in the shadow of the atomic bomb. It is also a story of India-its gods and its poets, its politics and its place in the American imagination.

Full Product Details

Author:   Deborah Baker
Publisher:   Penguin Putnam Inc
Imprint:   Avery Publishing Group Inc.,U.S.
Dimensions:   Width: 14.70cm , Height: 2.30cm , Length: 23.90cm
Weight:   0.417kg
ISBN:  

9781594201585

ISBN 10:   1594201587
Pages:   246
Publication Date:   10 April 2008
Audience:   General/trade ,  General
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In stock at warehouse  
We have this item in stock and it will be shipped directly from our warehouse.

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Reviews

A passionate account of the Beats at home and in the world. Baker captures the range of their artistic and spiritual passions, as well as their pettiness, their tantrums, their always difficult loves. Her tenderness and finely tuned humor, as well as her ease in both cultures, makes her a perfect recreator of this ornery band of seekers. And of the ways in which India and the United States have understood and misunderstood each other over the ages. A truly vivid, wonderful book. -Kiran Desai, author of The Inheritance of Loss Sympathetic without being sycophantic, Deborah Baker has made an important and vivid contribution to our understanding of the Beats, both as phenomenon and as individuals. More broadly, A Blue Hand is an original and entrancing account of how India expanded the possibilities of western consciousness. --Geoff Dyer, author of Out of Sheer Rage A fabulous book - comic, tragic, and written with great verve and nerve -about the Beats and their 'passage to I

A passionate account of the Beats at home and in the world. Baker captures the range of their artistic and spiritual passions, as well as their pettiness, their tantrums, their always difficult loves. Her tenderness and finely tuned humor, as well as her ease in both cultures, makes her a perfect recreator of this ornery band of seekers. And of the ways in which India and the United States have understood and misunderstood each other over the ages. A truly vivid, wonderful book. -Kiran Desai, author of The Inheritance of Loss Sympathetic without being sycophantic, Deborah Baker has made an important and vivid contribution to our understanding of the Beats, both as phenomenon and as individuals. More broadly, A Blue Hand is an original and entrancing account of how India expanded the possibilities of western consciousness. --Geoff Dyer, author of Out of Sheer Rage A fabulous book - comic, tragic, and written with great verve and nerve -about the Beats and their 'passage to India'. It is a remarkable saga of various lives and stories all drawn together by Deborah Baker - the biographer as adventurer. -Michael Ondaatje 'Beat' was short for 'beatitude, ' and India was the place to find it. A Blue Hand is a deeply researched, elegantly written account of those days of divine, induced, and congenital madness- the last adventures in American poetry. -Eliot Weinberger This is a haunting portrait of a band of poets bravely, if naively, taking on drugs, disease, unbridled passion, and the whole of Indian religious history, in an adventure that never fails to move and often instructs. A fascinating history of the weirdest moment in the long and ongoing European and Americansearch for the answer to it all in India. -Wendy Doniger, Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions in the Divinity School, University of Chicago I boarded those third class trains to enlightenment, and befriended the fragile heroes of this book. Deborah Baker's narrative is concise, rich, unsentimental and shows how, just like India, a spiritual journey is grotesque, sublime, comical, but never sad. -Francesco Clemente A beautiful book! As deftly woven and fully-realized as a novel, this is a fascinating, original work of scholarship, following the beat poets on their journeys to India in a way that illuminates their inner lives, their poetry and the fantastical nature of pilgrimage itself. -Melanie Thernstrom, author of Halfway Heaven

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