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The Dharma Bums
- Narrated by: Ethan Hawke
- Length: 7 hrs and 16 mins
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Publisher's summary
Jack Kerouac’s classic novel about friendship, the search for meaning, and the allure of nature
First published in 1958, a year after On the Road put the Beat Generation on the map, The Dharma Bums stands as one of Jack Kerouac's most powerful and influential novels. The story focuses on two ebullient young Americans - mountaineer, poet, and Zen Buddhist Japhy Ryder, and Ray Smith, a zestful, innocent writer - whose quest for Truth leads them on a heroic odyssey, from marathon parties and poetry jam sessions in San Francisco's Bohemia to solitude and mountain climbing in the High Sierras.
Critic reviews
"In [On the Road] Kerouac's heroes were sensation seekers; now they are seekers after truth...the novel often attains a beautiful dignity, and builds towards a moving climax." (The Chicago Tribune)
"In his often brilliant descriptions of nature one is aware of exhilarating power and originality...the entire cast of characters is presented with that not unrefreshing blend of naivete and sophistication that seems to be this author's forte." (The New York Times Book Review)
"Full of sparkling descritions of landscape and weather, light falling through trees, the smell of snow, the motion of animals...Jack Kerouac is a writer who cannot be charged with dullness." (The Atlantic)
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What listeners say about The Dharma Bums
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Michael E
- 04-28-20
Lyrical Rendition
I had read Dharma Bums and many other of Kerouac's books years ago and would say that they influenced me greatly. I thought it would be interesting to see how they translated to audio. I really didn't think they would because of Kerouac's rambling freestyle writing. I was wrong. The narrator had me in a joyful trance and brought back the emotions I had when I first read the novel. This is one of Kerouac's less frantic pieces and highly recommended to both fans and those who have not read or listened to him before. It was fun to listen to.
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10 people found this helpful
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- Courtney
- 06-05-20
Stupendous narration!
The narrator brought so much dimension and liveliness to Kerouac's writing, making voices for the various characters (in a very non-annoying way) and giving Kerouac the same emphatic tone with which he writes. Highly recommend.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Anne M Asher
- 03-13-20
A beautiful performance of an amazing novel
It was an absolute delight to listen to this book. It’s long been a favorite of mine. Ethan Hawke truly embodies the spirit and soul that is Kerouac and brings each amazing character to life in this beautiful story of self discovery, friendship, exploitation, wilderness, and soulful
wonder.
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2 people found this helpful
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- M. Davis
- 06-15-23
Adventures clouded with wine & spiritual fumbling
This book - and Kerouac's work in general - deserves credit for its trend-setting and historical importance. But outside that charity, it was a hard book to finish (I had to take a break and listen to something else in the middle). There are some parts of the story that were genuinely entertaining, as the main character, Ray Smith (a stand-in for Kerouac himself), jumps trains, dodges authorities, climbs mountains, and describes nature in prose that has a nice balance of detail and brevity.
Ethan Hawke's performance as a voice actor reading the story was fine, though the dialogue was sometimes hard to follow as many of the book'a young men were voiced in very similar ways.
The part of the book I found difficult is that Smith/Kerouac breaks up his adventures with often self-centered maunderings about a strongly Catholic-scented misapprehension of "Buddhism" that most today will recognize as the seed of much of the hippy movement's countercultural elements. Only the free love, anti-establishment talk, jeering at suburbia, and heavy drug use are all presented here in an especially shallow way that lacks self-reflection outside of stoned nonsense babble.
Smith/Kerouac's adventures were also largely made possible by a privilege (and misogyny) that goes unexamined in the book, with the characters preferring to believe that it is their special grasp of individual freedom that has lifted them above the status of the anonymous bums or hobos that appear throughout the story rather than their families' support and communities that are much more willing to assist young white men.
If you can stomach the horrific off-the-cuff "poetry" and warped, imaginary version of Buddhism, then the book offers listeners a decent series of adventures and is worthwhile for the historical context it provides.
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- Kindle Customer
- 08-05-22
Pointless
Cannot believe that anyone takes this seriously. I’ll save everyone some time- it’s about a hitchhiker that likes to drink wine all the time. Awful.
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- Amazon Customer
- 05-20-21
Sublime
Hawke does Kerouac a words justice
Perfect message for all times especially the ones we are in now
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- James Quatrine
- 09-15-20
Ethan Hawke is killing i!
A great rendition of a timeless classic. More Ethan Hawke reading Kerouac please! Thank you.
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- Anonymous User
- 08-08-20
So good
I listened to it twice! Such a timeless book! Spontaneous prose by the best to do it... highly recommended book!
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- Donald Truss
- 08-26-23
Wonderful
True medicine for the mind. Ten more words required for Audible- but adds nothing to my review
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- M. Thompson
- 08-16-23
If you have an outdoorsy bone in your body..
This was sort of what I expected but exactly what I needed. Ethan Hawk’s narration make it even more worthwhile. If you have an outdoorsy bone in your body, you can relate to a lot of this. I wish it was longer. I tried to listen to it at less than 1x speed but it was still over too quickly.
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Maybe it resonated with a different time and place
- By S. Phillips on 04-11-19
By: Tom Wolfe
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The Dharma Bums
- By: Jack Kerouac
- Narrated by: Allen Ginsberg
- Length: 2 hrs and 51 mins
- Abridged
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Two friends in 1950s San Francisco Bohemia explore Buddhism Zen - hipster style. On the road to finding Dharma, or truth, the story's narrator, Raymond Smith comes to a spiritual roadblock. Smith, based on Kerouac himself, discovers a role model in his friend Japhy Ryder, modeled after the real poet-Buddhist Gary Snyder. This autobiographical novel is one of Kerouac's most popular, and has served as an inspiration to the beat culture, hippies, and dharma seekers since the 1950s.
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Don't buy abridged versions of novels.
- By Ronald C. Wagner on 12-28-09
By: Jack Kerouac
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On the Road
- 50th Anniversary Edition
- By: Jack Kerouac
- Narrated by: Will Patton
- Length: 11 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Few novels have had as profound an impact on American culture as On the Road. Pulsating with the rhythms of 1950s underground America, jazz, sex, illicit drugs, and the mystery and promise of the open road, Kerouac’s classic novel of freedom and longing defined what it meant to be “beat” and has inspired generations of writers, musicians, artists, poets, and seekers who cite their discovery of the book as the event that “set them free”.
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My Favorite Narration and a Wonderful Book
- By Guillermo on 09-17-09
By: Jack Kerouac
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On the Road: The Original Scroll
- By: Jack Kerouac
- Narrated by: John Ventimiglia
- Length: 12 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Though Jack Kerouac began thinking about the novel that was to become On the Road as early as 1947, it was not until three weeks in April 1951, in an apartment on West 20th Street in Manhattan, that he wrote the first full draft that was satisfactory to him.
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A Classic Brought to Life
- By Sil A. on 11-25-16
By: Jack Kerouac
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Big Sur
- By: Jack Kerouac, Aram Saroyan - foreword
- Narrated by: Ethan Hawke
- Length: 6 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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In this 1962 novel, Kerouac's alter ego, Jack Duluoz, overwhelmed by success and excess, gravitates back and forth between wild binges in San Francisco and an isolated cabin on the California coast where he attempts to renew his spirit and clear his head of madness and alcohol. Only nature seems to restore him to a sense of balance. In the words of Allen Ginsberg, Big Sur "reveals consciousness in all its syntactic elaboration, detailing the luminous emptiness of his own paranoiac confusion".
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Astonishing Ethan Hawke Performance
- By L E Stewart on 11-10-20
By: Jack Kerouac, and others
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Wake Up
- A Life of the Buddha
- By: Jack Kerouac
- Narrated by: Danny Campbell
- Length: 5 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Originally written in 1955 and now published for the first time in audiobook form, Wake Up is Kerouac's retelling of the life of Prince Siddartha Gotama, who as a young man abandoned his wealthy family and comfortable home for a lifelong searchfor Enlightenment. Distilled from a wide variety of canonical scriptures, Wake Up serves as both a penetrating account of the Buddha's life and a concise primer on the principal teachings of Buddhism.
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I enjoyed Jacks biography of The Buddha
- By Joel on 07-10-23
By: Jack Kerouac
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The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
- By: Tom Wolfe
- Narrated by: Luke Daniels
- Length: 13 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Tom Wolfe - one of the 20th century’s foremost voices in cultural criticism - went from local news reporter to international icon in 1968, with the publication of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Now voiced with vivacity and vigor by Audible Hall of Fame narrator Luke Daniels, the non-fiction swan-dive delves into the world of hippies, hedonism, and everything in between.
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Maybe it resonated with a different time and place
- By S. Phillips on 04-11-19
By: Tom Wolfe
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Pnin
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 5 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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One of the best-loved of Nabokov's novels, Pnin features his funniest and most heart-rending character. Professor Timofey Pnin is a haplessly disoriented Russian emigre precariously employed on an American college campus in the 1950s. Pnin struggles to maintain his dignity through a series of comic and sad misunderstandings, all the while falling victim both to subtle academic conspiracies and to the manipulations of a deliberately unreliable narrator.
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Why not leave their private sorrows to people?
- By Darwin8u on 01-13-20
By: Vladimir Nabokov
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Desolation Angels
- By: Jack Kerouac
- Length: 13 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Originally published in 1965, this autobiographical novel covers a key year in Jack Kerouac’s life—the period that led up to the publication of On the Road in September of 1957. After spending two months in the summer of 1956 as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak in the North Cascade Mountains of Washington, Kerouac’s fictional self Jack Duluoz comes down from the isolated mountains to the wild excitement of the bars, jazz clubs, and parties of San Francisco, before traveling on to Mexico City, New York, Tangiers, Paris, and London.
By: Jack Kerouac
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Desolation Peak
- Collected Writings
- By: Jack Kerouac, Charles Shuttleworth - editor
- Narrated by: Christian Rummel
- Length: 7 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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In the summer of 1956, Jack Kerouac hitchhiked from Mill Valley, California, to the North Cascades to spend two months serving as a fire lookout for the US Forest Service. Taking only the Diamond Sutra for reading material, he intended to spend his time in deep contemplation and to achieve enlightenment.
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Kerouac at his most honest
- By MckyD’z on 12-01-22
By: Jack Kerouac, and others
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The Rebel
- By: Albert Camus
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 11 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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By one of the most profoundly influential thinkers of our century, The Rebel is a classic essay on revolution. For Albert Camus, the urge to revolt is one of the "essential dimensions" of human nature, manifested in man's timeless Promethean struggle against the conditions of his existence, as well as the popular uprisings against established orders throughout history. And yet, with an eye toward the French Revolution and its regicides and deicides, he reveals how inevitably the course of revolution leads to tyranny.
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This book is amazing
- By Amazon Customer on 10-06-19
By: Albert Camus
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Big Sur
- By: Jack Kerouac
- Narrated by: David Angelo
- Length: 6 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Arguably his finest post- On the Road novel, Big Sur captures Kerouac (here named Jack Duluoz) trying to escape the clamor of beatnik adulation by retreating to Lawrence Ferlinghetti's peaceful cabin in Big Sur. What begins as a pastoral regeneration descends into a personal hell when Kerouac suffers an alcoholic breakdown.
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Great performance with difficult material.
- By cosmitron on 06-14-18
By: Jack Kerouac
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The Sea Is My Brother
- By: Jack Kerouac
- Narrated by: Ray Porter
- Length: 4 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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