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Material Type | Library | Call Number | Item Barcode | Location |
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Book | Searching... Westford - J.V. Fletcher Library | B FERLINGHETTI | 31990005033597 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Dunstable Free Public Library | B FER | 32118000994808 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Hamilton-Wenham Public Library | B FERLINGHETTI, LAWRENCE | 30470001702082 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Haverhill Public Library | BIOG/FERLINGHETTI L | 31479006994841 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Lawrence Public Library | FIC FER | 31549004680467 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Lowell - Pollard Memorial Library | B FERLINGHETTI, L. | 31481005368142 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Methuen - Nevins Memorial Library | B FERLINGHETTI, L. | 31548003258408 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Newbury Town Library | BIO FERLINGHETTI | 32127001211781 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Newburyport Public Library | FIC FERLINGHETTI L | 32128003747434 | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
From the famed publisher and poet, author of the million-copy-selling collection A Coney Island of the Mind , his literary last will and testament -- part autobiography, part summing up, part Beat-inflected torrent of language and feeling, and all magical.
"A volcanic explosion of personal memories, political rants, social commentary, environmental jeremiads and cultural analysis all tangled together in one breathless sentence that would make James Joyce proud. . ."
--Ron Charles, The Washington Post
In this unapologetically unclassifiable work Lawrence Ferlinghetti lets loose an exhilarating rush of language to craft what might be termed a closing statement about his highly significant and productive 99 years on this planet. The "Little Boy" of the title is Ferlinghetti himself as a child, shuffled from his overburdened mother to his French aunt to foster childhood with a rich Bronxville family. Service in World War Two (including the D-Day landing), graduate work, and a scholar gypsy's vagabond life in Paris followed. These biographical reminiscences are interweaved with Allen Ginsberg-esque high energy bursts of raw emotion, rumination, reflection, reminiscence and prognostication on what we may face as a species on Planet Earth in the future. Little Boy is a magical font of literary lore with allusions galore, a final repository of hard-earned and durable wisdom, a compositional high wire act without a net (or all that much punctuation) and just a gas and an inspiration to read.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
"I've always been off in my own burb in some suburb of consciousness dreaming away or otherwise goofing off," writes the author of this wonderfully effusive autobiographical prose poem. Ferlinghetti (A Coney Island of the Mind, etc.), who turns 100 this year, offers a lyrical accounting of his life, both the "Me-me-me," with whom he identifies, and "the Other," who is his "shadow self." He also reflects on his private preoccupations with such broader issues as "ecological meltdown," third-world politics, and the "bad breath... of industrial civilization"-what he refers to as a way "to find the universal in the particular." He provides vivid memories of his tumultuous childhood, shuttled between family, orphanages, and the foster family he eventually chose for his own, and his wartime experiences as part of the D-Day invasion. Ferlinghetti's prose pulses with the enjambments that energized the beats, whose work he published (famously, Ginsberg's Howl), and it's punctuated with such stunningly evocative metaphors as his recall of himself in Paris in 1948 as "a little like Conrad carrying Coleridge's albatross and the albatross my past"-one of the numerous literary allusions that pepper the text. This book is a Proustian celebration of both memory and moments that will delight readers. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
In this novel-cum-memoir-cum-grand finale, the centenarian US author and friend of the beats takes a wild journey through his lifetime in literature Little Boy is a book by an old man: Lawrence Ferlinghetti celebrated his 100th birthday this year with the publication of this novel-cum-memoir-cum-grand-finale. Even if Ferlinghetti's great age were irrelevant - which it is not ("the only plot of this book being my constant aging") - it would be pretty much unreviewable because ... well, because Ferlinghetti is Ferlinghetti, the founder of City Lights bookshop in San Francisco, publisher and friend of the beats, poet, artist, activist and living legend, and no one in their right mind wants to argue with a living legend. Especially when that legend is aged 100 and writes likes this: AND Little Boy, grown up after an endless series of confusions transplantations transformations instigations fornications confessions prognostications hallucinations consternations confabulations collaborations revelations recognitions restitutions reverberations misconceptions clarifications elucidations simplifications idealisations aspirations circumnavigations realisations radicalisations and liberations, Grown Boy came into his own voice and let loose his word-hoard pent up within him. A final loosening of a word-hoard is exactly what Little Boy is, and who could object to such an exercise of freedom? This isn't a book: it's a reckoning. Having seen the best minds of his generation destroyed by mental illness, drink and drugs, and generally defeated by life, Ferlinghetti clearly feels at liberty to say whatever he wants, about whoever he wants, however he wants, and in whatever order he wants. Thus there are various reminiscences about "Ginzy" and "Ti Jean Jack Kerouac" and "Neal Cocksman"; William Seward Burroughs, "the original genius con-man"; "Tea Ass Eliot he of Sant Louey posing as a perfect British gentleman". Many a hobbyhorse is relentlessly ridden: "Well so let me tell you I mean that the single root problem in the whole world the problem of problems underlying all the ills of the world can be traced back to overpopulation like why is there so much pollution because there are too many cars and too many coal-burning plants because too many people want cars and heat etc etc." The book might best be described as one long etc etc. The most affecting parts of Little Boy are in fact those that most closely resemble a traditional memoir or autobiography, because Ferlinghetti's life, even simply told, is utterly extraordinary. "Little Boy was quite lost," the text begins. "He had no idea who he was or where he had come from. He was with Aunt Emilie whom he loved very much. She had taken him in swaddling clothes from his mother who already had four sons and could not handle a fifth born a few months after his father died of a heart attack." After this unofficial adoption, Little Boy - who seems to be Ferlinghetti in all but name - is taken to France, and then to Strasbourg, and then back to an orphanage in New York, before ending up in the charge of a wealthy family, the Bislands, who have employed Little Boy's aunt as a governess. By chance, the Bislands had a little boy of their own named Lawrence who died in infancy, and so they duly set about raising Little Boy as if he were their own: this is his second unofficial adoption. After boarding school he goes to the University of North Carolina and then joins the US navy, ending up in Nagasaki, where he "saw the landscape of hell and became an instant pacifist", before returning to the US to go to grad school and then the University of Paris on the GI Bill. You're with it so far? Because that's only the beginning. After all of that there's the bookshop, and the beats, and a lifetime in publishing and politics. A few years ago Ferlinghetti published Writing Across the Landscape: Travel Journals, 1960-2010 , in which he chronicled many of his adventures and activities; Little Boy represents the corresponding journey inwards. In the end, he writes: "I am just an old guy singing 'Auld Lang Syne' in a high drunken voice and reliving all his lives on earth like Krapp in his Last Tape recording everything he remembers or in the Nothing because the older he gets the more he forgets until in the end it's all amnesia and he can remember nothing at all of vast spaces of time and he's left only with his present moment or everybody's present moment the great terrible moving moment of Now alone with himself and his lonely consciousness alone on his own little island of me, and so is that it?" So is that it? Who knows. Centenarian authors are certainly few and far between, but Ferlinghetti has been surprising himself and defying others for years: there may yet be more to come. Many happy returns.
Booklist Review
On the eve of his 100th birthday, renowned poet Ferlinghetti delivers an enigmatic work that serves as a fitting coda to a long and productive career, even as it emphatically resists anything resembling resolution or conclusion. Early passages, sketching an underloved boy bounced among relatives in the New York suburbs, suggest autobiography, just as glimpses of an old man writing in an existentialist café on the left coast of this country, watching reality pass by with a wild eye imply memoir. Neither is accurate. Forty pages in, Ferlinghetti has opened up the stream-of-consciousness throttle and dialed back the punctuation, and we find ourselves flooded with language, splashing among free-associative verse, literary references, end-times lamentations, sensual (and sexual) celebrations, political jabs, and more than a few groanworthy puns. There's always another thought to be spoken or written and we can't go on but I do, declares Ferlinghetti. And that may be the point of this dissonant, bewildering, intermittently beautiful book: the end can be kept at bay so long as one can keep pushing out whirlwinds of words.--Brendan Driscoll Copyright 2019 Booklist