Off the Shelf - Americana

Goodreads Rating: 3.64
Elliptical Rating: 5
Elliptical Review (September 2007):
"This might be the Great American novel other authors only hope to write. Kerouac based it on his life, so a few famous Beats are in it with different names. It's the kind of book you can read once and then go back later and enjoy random sections. The ending is classic."

 

Goodreads Rating: 4.14
Elliptical Rating: 4
Edited Elliptical Review (March 2010): 
"Obviously, "Howl" dominates this collection. In length as well as notoriety. The first section is a testament to what can be done with words. The third section is also good stuff. Though the second section is less impressive. But it's a 4 1/2 star poem, even by my harsh standards.
"A Supermarket in California" and "America" are the two other pieces that stand out. The quartet of earlier poems are just that - the work of a poet who was still developing his talents."

 

Goodreads Rating: 3.94
Elliptical Rating: 4
Elliptical Review (March 2017)
"There's a lot here: some history of bridge building, statistics and trivia about the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, how it affected people who were living in the area, info about people who worked on the bridge or were involved in the planning, etc."

 

Goodreads Rating: 3.64
Elliptical Rating: 4
Edited Elliptical Review (April 2010):
"Jacobs does a good job of presenting what amounts to an introduction to Weather. He takes us through the organization's chronology and addresses both their successes and their failures. He also gives the reader a picture of them in relation to other left-wing groups of the era. And he raises various issues regarding race, gender, and class, as well as indivdual freedom or lack thereof in the U.S.
I think his reluctance to delve more deeply into the driving personalities behind Weather was a mistake. It was inevitably a personality-driven group due to its small size. I would also have appreciated more input from former Weather members in the current era, or looking back on their time in Weather, in other words. Though to be fair to Jacobs, he might have asked to interview them and been refused. There is a leftist slant to the writing, though Jacobs admits as much at the outset, so it's tolerable."

 

Goodreads Rating: 4.02
Elliptical Rating: 4