Just Kids: A National Book Award Winner - Softcover

Smith, Patti

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0060936223 ISBN 13: 9780060936228

Publisher: Ecco Press, 2010

Synopsis

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD

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.

About this title

Review:

"Funny, fascinating, oddly tender."--O, The Oprah Magazine

"An utterly charming, captivating, intimate portrait of a late 1960s and early 1970s period of intense artistic ferment in downtown Manhattan significantly shaped and keenly observed by rock firebrand Smith."--Philadelphia Inquirer

"Just Kids shows how Smith integrated the romance of her twenty-year friendship with Mapplethorpe with her historical preoccupations, elevating them to an almost sacred status. The past, for Smith, has always driven her life forward. If only we could all be so free-spirited."--The Rumpus

"A revelation. In a spellbinding memoir as notable for its restraint as for its lucidity, its wit as well as its grace, Smith tells the story of how she and Robert Mapplethorpe found each other... beautifully crafted, vivid, and indelible."--Booklist

"JUST KIDS describes [Smith and Mapplethorpe's] ascent with a forthright sweetness that will ring true to anyone who knows her work."--Bloomberg.com

"The most compelling memoir by a rock artist since Bob Dylan's 'Chronicles: Volume One, ' written with intimacy and grace...."--Chicago Tribune

"A remarkable book --sweet and charming and many other words you wouldn't expect to apply to a punk-rock icon."--Newsday

"Patti Smith's memoir of her youth with Robert Mapplethorpe testifies to a rare and ferocious innocence...'Just Kids' is a book utterly lacking in irony or sophisticated cynicism."--Salon.com

"The most enchantingly evocative memoir of funky-but-chic New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s that any alumnus has yet committed to print."--Janet Maslin's top 10 books of 2010, New York Times

"More than 30 years after its release, Horses still has the power to shock and inspire young musicians to express themselves with unbridled passion. Now she brings the same raw, lyrical quality to her first book of prose."--Clive Davis, Vanity Fair

Book Description:

Winner of the 2010 Non-Fiction National Book Award Patti Smith's evocative, honest and moving coming-of-age story of her extraordinary relationship with the artist Robert Mapplethorpe

About this edition

• Publisher: Ecco Press
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0060936223
• ISBN 13: 9780060936228
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320