”There is a mountain in the state of Washington called Desolation Peak, although desolation is not something that rises but a force with a downward pull. You have a passion for the beat writers, particularly Jack Kerouac, with whom Johnson spent several years of as lover and friend. “Besides the music, I’m learning a great many other things very rapidly, such as the fact that America is a place of enormous injustice and inequality, where the little children of minders starve in shacks and where Negro men are lynched or jailed for crimes that are not even crimes…” Joyce Johnson, a writer of scope and clarity and charm, won the Book Critics Circle Award for this great piece of writing, a must read if you fall into one or more of the following: You love a beautifully written, intimate story that reveals a cultural revolution in the making. Now and then, a good memoir touches the heart, and also educates, and this memoir, published in 1983 and reissued in 1999 is touching and inspiring and beautifully reveals a time many of us mythologize. By Joyce Johnson Paperback, 265 pages By Randy Kraft
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