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    On the Road: 50th Anniversary Edition
    Unavailable
    On the Road: 50th Anniversary Edition
    Unavailable
    On the Road: 50th Anniversary Edition
    Audiobook (abridged)2 hours

    On the Road: 50th Anniversary Edition

    Written by Jack Kerouac

    Narrated by David Carradine

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    On the Road is the classic story of two characters who set off on an odyssey through 1950s underground America.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHighBridge Audio
    Release dateSep 17, 2008
    ISBN9781598877052
    Unavailable
    On the Road: 50th Anniversary Edition
    Author

    Jack Kerouac

    Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) es el novelista más destacado y emblemático de la Generación Beat. En Anagrama se han publicado sus obras fundamentales: En el camino, Los subterráneos, Los Vagabundos del Dharma, La vanidad de los Duluoz y En la carretera. El rollo mecanografiado original, además de Cartas, la selección de su correspondencia con Allen Ginsberg, y, con William S. Burroughs, Y los hipopótamos se cocieron en sus tanques.

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    Reviews for On the Road

    3.5/5

    6,277 ratings174 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Love, love, love this book. And pretty much everything else Kerouac touched.
    • 1/5
      It did not work for me
    • 2/5
      I'm maybe too old to appreciate this one. I liked it at the beginning, and there is no doubt this book is well written, but around halfway though, I was sick of Sal's white male chauvinist homophobe semi-racist crap, and really wished something new would happen. Also, I wanted to slap the shit out of Dean.
    • 2/5
      This is a book I read because I "needed to know." For all the hype surrounding Kerouac, I thought it was a real let-down. In its day I'm sure it was ground-breaking, but I didn't much care for it.
    • 3/5
      There are some marvellously well-written passages in this, and I enjoyed it, but in terms of plot this is a book where lots goes on without much really happening. I also found the key character of Dean quite unlikable, and found it difficult to believe someone as eloquent as the narrator would be such good friends with him.Overall this book didn't have the impact on me that it seems to have had on so many people. Perhaps I am the wrong age, or from the wrong age.
    • 1/5
      Too boring to finish ...
    • 1/5
      I hated this book
    • 5/5
      My rite of passage.
    • 3/5
      I went in expecting not to like this. My cursory knowledge of the beat generation icons led me to believe they were all pretentious assholes, which definitely seems to be true. What I forgot is that a pretentious asshole can still write a decent book, and that a book doesn't have to be about good or likable people to be engrossing.

      Kerouac paints a vivid picture of an America so far removed from me in time that it might as well be a different country. The book is somewhat worth reading for that alone. Beyond that, though, is a remarkably compelling first-person narrator. There's just something about the voice of it that draws you in. A madness, if you will. A lust for life, an insane hedonism, a massively conflated sense of self-importance.

      Speaking of madness, Kerouac, apparently, wrote this on a single sheet of paper (he taped them together so he wouldn't have to stop typing) over three weeks while being kept up by coffee, cigarettes, and drugs. He cut and added things here and there after that, but essentially we're reading the result of a three-week outpouring of work based on the extensive notes he took during the journey. It shows. The writing is still rough. Sentences go on for too long and obviously should have been cut into two distinct sentences. Existential tangents blindside you constantly. A lack of focus permeates the whole thing. On the whole I don't mean any of it in a bad way, necessarily. It is, I think, an intrinsic part of the appeal. If this same book had been written in a more "put together" way, I would count it as an overall loss. It's raw, ephemeral, like it came from some otherworldly force instead of human hands. It definitely fits his character, at the very least.

      Still, there are major problems. Mostly in pacing and any sort of consistent quality. The beginning and end of the book contains solid four star material, and there are similar gems lurking in the middle as well--but there are also some long bits that are two stars at best. I feel like 3/5 is a fair average of my experience, but it was by no means consistently that good the entire way through. Just keep that in mind. You will hit parts that drag and they drag hard.
    • 5/5
      Kerouac represents the next evolution in American twentieth-century literature in my view. I am also curious about the fascination with the Dharma at Big Sur and the Great Divide exemplified by the music of my most favourite composer, John Adams, and the appearance of these themes in Jack Kerouac's work. The continental fascination in Adams' work is clearly explored in On the Road. The Beat Age is clearly the mid-life crisis of Fitzgerald's Jazz Age which evolves into the hippy era in old age. Kerouac captures this beautifully and I can only imagine the reception the novel received in the 1950s. Kerouac is so obviously lining himself up with Hemingway that it is not only obvious but overt. I suspect Steinbeck's influence is somewhat more covert. Yet Kerouac's influence on popular culture is more than obvious and readers can expect to notice parts of On the Road that appear unoriginal, yet this is obviously the original source for the nuances that are so prolific today. I felt a tinge of sadness as I approached the end of the book, almost as if I wished the road would keep going forever. In many ways, I suspect this was Kerouac's point. Definitely one of my favourite reads and I am now exploring Cormac McCarthy's The Road to keep the theme going. Keoruac certainly makes we want to go on a road trip sooner rather than later. If only I could drive the Cadillacs and Plymouths and Fords of that era!
    • 2/5
      Boring. It does nothing to increase my view of the world or expose humanity in any way. Maybe because I grew up with my father and uncles telling these exact same stories, but this did absolutely nothing for me.
    • 3/5
      Some good prose and very good descriptions. I didn't like the characters and how they treated other people and women were portrayed as something to use and discard. Some parts of the book were so manic they exhausted me. I've heard this is a classic because it was the first "stream of conscientious" novel. Whatever.
    • 1/5
      Not my cup of tea
    • 1/5
      "On the Road" was written in the 50's. The story takes place in the late 40s. I understand from other writeups on this over-rated book that it is somewhat autobiographical - protagonist Sal is Kerouac who died in the 60s at the age of 47 from alcohol related problems, and his sidekick Dean is Neal Cassady, who died in the 60s at 41++ apparently from drug problems. Our heroes. There is one brief passage toward the end of this book that pretty much summarizes the whole plot. Dean says to Sal - "we gotta go and never stop till we get there.""Where we going, man?""I don't know but we gotta go"Actually this has been going on since page 1, as they criss-cross the country multiple times, sometimes, solo, other times together. Only to turn around and go back to wherever. They never have money. They work cotton fields, they pan-handle, they write aunties to wire money to them. Most of the money seems to get spent on bus tickets, booze, and gas; hygiene is not a major worry.. They and their buddies seem to have trouble with marriage. They have an eye out for girls, sometimes rather young girls. They seem to constantly be high on life, or other things, but there are relatively few references to drugs - I suspect that has more to do with publication concerns than it does with what was happening. They are into music and often talk in extremes. Everything they experience seems to be the best, the greatest, the biggest, the highest. Here's a scene in a Frisco nightclub.....a bongo player, shirtless, slows down the beat and barely taps as everyone breathlessly leans forward. This goes on for sometime, and then he slowly takes the mike and for the next 15 minutes chants......Great-orooni.....fine-ovauti.....hello-orooni.....bourbon-orooni.....oroonirooni.Want to see what these characters were like in real life? Check them out on YouTube. Well, if this is "beat" then it's just one more extreme art form that seems incredibly over-rated, with minimal contribution and a lot of bs.
    • 4/5
      "On the Road" is a love story. The beloved is the wild, reckless, exuberant, amoral freedom that is Dean Moriarty. Dean Moriarty is the narrator's sometime companion on the road, but more importantly, he is an idea, an idea that is constantly moving and always just out of reach. On the face of it, these characters are fairly unappealing - Dean is a bum and womanizer, marrying and discarding his women, and yet always welcomed back. He steals cars, shoplifts, cares little about others' safety or feelings, and yet he is charismatic with a bevy of people following his lead, driving across the land at 110 miles per hour searching for IT. But what is IT? It is the ecstasy of dissolving oneself in the beauty of a held musical note, it is the otherness of other people, it is the suspension of a moment in time. It is a wild ride that continues forever. No one in their right mind would want to be these people, but that joy of being alive, not worrying about the next minute, or next week, or next year, is intoxicating. In the end, we've all had a "friend" like Dean. Someone whose charisma draws you in, makes you feel like the only important person to them, and then inevitably lets you down. And only after a distance of time and space, do you look back and think, "what was I thinking?" In the cold light of day that person doesn't look at all like a "friend". And yet that spark was there. This is what "On the Road" is about, chasing that spark.
    • 4/5
      This book was a well-written, interesting narrative about people I would absolutely hate and despise.
    • 5/5
      You know what they say? Never go back to the things of your youth. On the Road was a book that made a big impression on myself, at a tender age so, what would happen were I to re-read it as an old fogie? The answer was, that all the burning sentiment of my youth came rushing back. This was a great read a few decades back, and it was a great re-read now. Kerouac's book purports to be a travelogue covering a youngster's traversing of the United States. It even works on that level, with an added twist of history nowadays but, it is at its most potent as the story of the growth of a naive lad, Sal Paradise, into a man.If you haven't read this book, I'll try not to judge you, but I suggest that you obtain, and digest, a copy quickly: you'll be glad that you did!!!
    • 3/5
      I think that this would have been a much better read had I read it at a different point in my life.

      Had I read this book when I was on the cusp of adulthood, cynical to the world, and eager to see what the world had to offer me, this would have left a much better taste in my mouth. Instead, I'm a little older, a little wiser, and not so much into the silly, crazy shenanigans that sales and friends find themselves throughout the many escapades while On the Road.

      I think another reason why I may not have enjoyed it as much as others who have praised it as the great American novel is because I simply read it too fast. I think that to enjoy it for what it was really worth, a slower pace of reading with many days to let the plot simmer in my brain would have allowed for a better appreciation of the story. Alas, as soon as I read the first few chapters and realized that this was not for me, I sped read through the entire thing in a manner of days.

      For all my complaints, there were a few memorable scenes. The imagery of the waving figure on the horizon as one drives away comes to mind. Not to mention the angel devil on wheels, as evoked by the character of Dean.

      An okay novel for those that want to relive their bohemian days on the road.
    • 4/5
      A very impressive accomplishment but didn't really do much for me.
    • 2/5
      "Hey guyz, let's drink an entire bottle of Robotussin and then go on a car ride!"
      - this book
    • 5/5
      I deemed this my favorite novel at one time.
    • 3/5
      Over-rated ramblings of self-puffery and female objectification.
    • 3/5
      The writing is of a high standard in this book, but the story is a meandering and rather repetitive account of encounters with eccentrics and women, mostly while drunk and/or high. It reminded me a bit of the film "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" - lots of pleasures along the way, but a slightly unsatisfying whole.
    • 4/5
      a necessary read.
    • 2/5
      Painful reading experience! Don't care anyone in the book. The life described in the book fits people's wild and rebelling dream in the old days. However, today we also need some positive energy which is lack of obviously in this book.
    • 3/5
      Kerouac misspelled Thelonious in this novel. Page 228: "..and meeting mad Thelonius [sic.] Monk."

      This bothers me. And it bothers me that no one bothered to fix it, especially in this "Great Book of the 20th Century" edition. Kerouac also references a non-existent drummer named Max West (p.208) in the context of Dizzy. Pretty sure he meant Max Roach.

      And finally on page 155 there's this: "Fort Lowell Road, out where Hingham lived, would [sic.] along lovely riverbed trees in the flat desert."

      I think that was supposed to be "wound along lovely..."

      Copy editors?
    • 1/5
      Don't get me wrong, I can do books that have zero plot, hence why I love Salinger, but this is just terrible. Seriously, how can anyone love this? I won't be reading it again, thats for sure.
    • 3/5
      This was a revolutionary book and it is remarkable that this autobiographical story takes place almost immediately after WW II. Then it must have been truly revolutionary. Now, the characters just seem like opportunistic misogynistic asshats.
    • 3/5
      I found this a bit of a let-down. The early stages were enjoyable, but it seemed to degenerate into a series of meaningless trips, and I found Dean quite tiresome. The trip to Mexico, late on, was interesting, but overall I was just a bit disappointed given the book's reputation.
    • 2/5
      On the Road is a loved classic but I just cannot say that I liked it. I've given it two stars for some beautiful quotes by Kerouac but the story as a whole irritated me. I like the idea of hitting the wide open road and can certainly relate. There were many segments of the book that reminded me of times on a road trip West taken last year. I am not a stranger to sleeping in vehicles and trying to live on as little money as possible and yet never feeling happier. Despite that this book was almost painful to read at times. The characters were unlikeable and forgive me for saying but most of them were pigs (I'm looking at you Sal) and not worth the pages it took to get to know them.