Brendan Behan's New York

Fülszöveg

BRENDAN BEHAN S NEW YORK
with drawings by Paul Hogarth
'You're F.B.I., Brendan', said the proprietor of
McSorley's, the famous old ale house in New York,
So the Foreign Born Irish, Brendan Behan, takes
us on his last tour of what he calls 'the most
exciting city in the world'._
His anthropological investigations cover a wide
variety of places, people and things, always
accompanied by ribald anecdote and rumbustious
description. Whether he is buying a paper off an
old lady in Harlem, swimming in the baths at the
Young Men's Hebrew Association, visiting a 'bum'
on the Bowery, or having a jar with 'one of his own'
in an Irish saloon on Third Avenue, he has always
an eye for the colour of the situation and the wit to
express it. Neither the serious nor the absurd are
secure from his investigations, and the 'sacred
cows' fall happily.
Intellectually stimulating, Brendan Behan discusses
Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation and Scott
Fitzgerald and the Lost... Tovább

Fülszöveg

BRENDAN BEHAN S NEW YORK
with drawings by Paul Hogarth
'You're F.B.I., Brendan', said the proprietor of
McSorley's, the famous old ale house in New York,
So the Foreign Born Irish, Brendan Behan, takes
us on his last tour of what he calls 'the most
exciting city in the world'._
His anthropological investigations cover a wide
variety of places, people and things, always
accompanied by ribald anecdote and rumbustious
description. Whether he is buying a paper off an
old lady in Harlem, swimming in the baths at the
Young Men's Hebrew Association, visiting a 'bum'
on the Bowery, or having a jar with 'one of his own'
in an Irish saloon on Third Avenue, he has always
an eye for the colour of the situation and the wit to
express it. Neither the serious nor the absurd are
secure from his investigations, and the 'sacred
cows' fall happily.
Intellectually stimulating, Brendan Behan discusses
Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation and Scott
Fitzgerald and the Lost Generation of the 'Twenties.
He discourses on his meeting with Alan Ginsberg,
Frank Fields, the coloured composer, George
Klein singer, the composer of Archie and Mehitabel,
Arthur Miller, James Baldwin, Agnes O'Neill
Boulton, the widow of Eugene O'Neill, and many
others.
The spirit of the text is brilliantly complemented by
Paul Hogarth, whose drawings evoke a nostalgia for
the known and not so well-known features of the
'melting pot of the world', and continue the
partnership which proved to be so successful in
Brendan Behan's island, a Book Society Choice.
Paul Hogarth describes New York as a 'lovable
jungle which gives me a charge a minute'. He
anticipated steel and glass complexities but not
such a rich abundance of vintage ferries and
suspension-bridges, elevated railroads, old hotels
and cogenially mature bars. To digest the startling
image-range of the dynamic metropolis, Hogarth
visited the city in 1962 and 1963. His sensitivity to
people and places helps make brendan behan'S
new york an outstanding collaboration between
author and artist. Vissza