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Just Kids |  | Author: Patti Smith
Publisher: Ecco
Category: Book
List Price: $27.00
Buy New: $14.40
as of 3/11/2010 11:26 CST details
You Save: $12.60 (47%)
Seller: best_bargain_books3
Rating:  reviews
Sales Rank: 296
Media: Hardcover
Edition: First Edition
Pages: 304
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6.1 x 1.3
ISBN: 006621131X
Dewey Decimal Number: 782.42166092
EAN: 9780066211312
ASIN: 006621131X
Publication Date: January 1, 2010
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Features:
| • | ISBN13: 9780066211312 | | • | Condition: NEW | | • | Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark. |
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best Books of the Month, January 2010: Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe weren't always famous, but they always thought they would be. They found each other, adrift but determined, on the streets of New York City in the late '60s and made a pact to keep each other afloat until they found their voices--or the world was ready to hear them. Lovers first and then friends as Mapplethorpe discovered he was gay, they divided their dimes between art supplies and Coney Island hot dogs. Mapplethorpe was quicker to find his metier, with a Polaroid and then a Hasselblad, but Smith was the first to fame, transformed, to her friend's delight, from a poet into a rock star. (Mapplethorpe soon became famous too--and notorious--before his death from AIDS in 1989.) Smith's memoir of their friendship, Just Kids, is tender and artful, open-eyed but surprisingly decorous, with the oracular style familiar from her anthems like "Because the Night," "Gloria," and "Dancing Barefoot" balanced by her powers of observation and memory for everyday details like the price of automat sandwiches and the shabby, welcoming fellow bohemians of the Chelsea Hotel, among whose ranks these baby Rimbauds found their way. --Tom Nissley
Product Description
It was the summer Coltrane died, the summer of love and riots, and the summer when a chance encounter in Brooklyn led two young people on a path of art, devotion, and initiation. Patti Smith would evolve as a poet and performer, and Robert Mapplethorpe would direct his highly provocative style toward photography. Bound in innocence and enthusiasm, they traversed the city from Coney Island to Forty-second Street, and eventually to the celebrated round table of Max's Kansas City, where the Andy Warhol contingent held court. In 1969, the pair set up camp at the Hotel Chelsea and soon entered a community of the famous and infamous—the influential artists of the day and the colorful fringe. It was a time of heightened awareness, when the worlds of poetry, rock and roll, art, and sexual politics were colliding and exploding. In this milieu, two kids made a pact to take care of each other. Scrappy, romantic, committed to create, and fueled by their mutual dreams and drives, they would prod and provide for one another during the hungry years. Just Kids begins as a love story and ends as an elegy. It serves as a salute to New York City during the late sixties and seventies and to its rich and poor, its hustlers and hellions. A true fable, it is a portrait of two young artists' ascent, a prelude to fame.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Patti Smith-Just Kids March 8, 2010
Bernadette T. Kunz (South San Francisco, CA)
LOVED reading about her step into being a young artist
and her views and interactions ...
Inspiring, moving, beautiful book March 8, 2010
Patricia Goldberg (New York, NY)
I picked up Just Kids not knowing what to expect as I was actually unfamiliar with most of Patti Smith's work (and could only remember Mapplethorpe's dust-up with the NEA after his death), but I found this book so compelling and ultimately so inspiring to anyone who wishes to pursue his/her art. And unexpectedly, I discovered a beautiful, non-traditional love story so moving that I sat alone and cried for about an hour upon finishing Just Kids. I wholeheartedly recommend this book.
 Well Done !!!!! March 7, 2010
R. M. Ettinger (Cleveland Heights, OH USA)
I'm not like my other friends.
They are voracious readers, mostly of novels. I've always had a tough time getting into most novels, most likely because I choose poorly when it comes to them. Just ask my friends - I don't see them letting me pick a book any time soon for our off-again/off-again (no, not a typo) book club.
I blame Terry Gross for making even bad books and authors sound interesting. I can't even tell you how many books I've bought from listening to Fresh Air - and so far I have yet to be remotely thrilled with any of them. My friends rightfully slammed me for my choice. I don't think we've had a joint book read since. It was that bad.
Because of my bad choices - and this has been a life-long pattern, by the way - anymore I normally stick to history, memoirs, biographies and auto-biographies. You can't go wrong reading seven books about Patty Hearst, Mount Everest or the Vietnam War, can you?
So I just finished reading Patti Smith's book - 'Just Kids'.
Not an auto-biography, not quite a memoir. It centers as a telling of her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe. She strays a little off the direct relationship here and there, but she always brings it around quite nicely. For the first two-thirds, Smith rarely talks about herself where it does not involve Mapplethorpe.
But what I'm loving is her writing style. I have always loved her as a songwriter/artist, but those are snippets into how well she can put pen to paper - and you just know that is how she wrote it.
I'd say, "oh to live from 1968-1973.....", but I was alive. I just was not living at the Chelsea Hotel in New York City. I am totally envious of Smith and Mapplethorpe.
Perhaps it is just her prose, but to be in that hotel - and running into Grace Slick, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin in the hotel bar, all at the same time? It can't just be her telling of it, it had to be incredible.
Or to have William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg staying in the same hotel and become your friends???? Or Sam Shepard to be your lover? I'd say "surreal", but that would be reserved for running into Salvador Dali in the lobby while you're holding a stuffed raven and have him comment on it.
That doesn't even cover her friendships with Todd Rundgren (really?), Jim Carroll or a relationship with a member of Blue Oyster Cult (really, really???). This was all before she ever became famous in her own right.
You'd think it was some really great acid trip, but it's not. At times it almost borders on namedropping, but she never quite goes over that line.
I suppose this book can be as much about her unorthodox relationship with Mapplethorpe as it is with Smith's fascination with 19th century poet, Arthur Rimbaud. You do not go too many pages where Rimbaud is not referenced somewhere.
Now, I like Patti Smith as an artist and always have, but I think anyone would find this book fascinating.
Beautiful March 6, 2010
Daniel Holland (Arroyo Grande, CA United States)
I really loved this book. Smith's writing is simple and elegant, and the story of these two lovers and then friends is just beautiful. She tells what happened without a bunch of name dropping or whining or gossiping, which could easily have been the case. I'm sure there was a lot of BS swirling around he scene during these times and she filters it down to the essentials and it really held my interest.
I actually had never heard her albums, except maybe some snippets. I happened to get "Horses" the day I finished the book. I played it and it is completely awesome. She rocks. But her poetry and talking is the clencher. Combination of singing and verse and she sings it from the gut. Reading her book, you get a sense of her depth and intelligence but you gotta listen to her music because she is fantastic.
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