Just Kids
Patti Smith
Just Kids
'It was the summer that Coltrane died. The summer Jimi Hendrix set his guitar in flames and China exploded the H-bomb. There were riots in Newark and marches against the war in Vietnam. The world was on the brink of change. It was the summer of love. And the summer of a chance encounter that would change the course of my life. It was the summer I met Robert.' Just Kids is the story of two innocents who shed sheltered lives and braved the city in search of art and freedom. In each other Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith found kindred spirits and pursued their mutual dreams, from Brooklyn to the Chelsea Hotel into the world. Each would eventually reach the pinnacle of artistic achievement and their vow to always care for one another survived painful trials and separations. Mapplethorpe's unforgettable portrait of Smith for the cover of Horses forever fuses their indelible mark on our culture. Intimate and broadly evocative of New York in the early 70s, Just Kids - part romance, part elegy - is finally about friendship in the truest sense, and the artist's calling.
4.6 out of 5 based on 5 reviews
|
Omniscore:
|
| Classification |
Non-fiction |
| Genre |
Biography |
| Format |
Hardback |
| Pages |
304 |
| RRP |
£18.99 |
| Date of Publication |
February 2010 |
| ISBN |
978-0747548409 |
| Publisher |
Bloomsbury |
| |
'It was the summer that Coltrane died. The summer Jimi Hendrix set his guitar in flames and China exploded the H-bomb. There were riots in Newark and marches against the war in Vietnam. The world was on the brink of change. It was the summer of love. And the summer of a chance encounter that would change the course of my life. It was the summer I met Robert.' Just Kids is the story of two innocents who shed sheltered lives and braved the city in search of art and freedom. In each other Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith found kindred spirits and pursued their mutual dreams, from Brooklyn to the Chelsea Hotel into the world. Each would eventually reach the pinnacle of artistic achievement and their vow to always care for one another survived painful trials and separations. Mapplethorpe's unforgettable portrait of Smith for the cover of Horses forever fuses their indelible mark on our culture. Intimate and broadly evocative of New York in the early 70s, Just Kids - part romance, part elegy - is finally about friendship in the truest sense, and the artist's calling.
Read an extract from the book on the publisher's website
Reviews
The New York Times
Tom Carson
"Terrifically evocative… “Just Kids” is the most spellbinding and diverting portrait of funky-but-chic New York in the late ’60s and early ’70s that any alumnus has committed to print. The tone is at once flinty and hilarious, which figures: she’s always been both tough and funny, two real saving graces in an artist this prone to excess. What’s sure to make her account a cornucopia for cultural historians, however, is that the atmosphere, personalities and mores of the time are so astutely observed."
11/02/2010
Read Full Review
The Sunday Times
Camilla Long
"She has an endearing tendency to moan things such as, “I’m not a singer I’m a poet”, but in general, this is a spectacular read, lively and unusual. Her eye for detail and anecdote (“Sam said…‘Peggy Guggenheim once told me that when you slept with Brancusi you were absolutely not allowed to touch his beard’ ”) is brilliant; her cast of characters unsurpassed. But her deeper theme of young lives needlessly lost, slowly developed through the deaths of Brian Jones, Jim Morrison and Joplin, is ultimately the most powerful."
11/02/2010
Read Full Review
The Washington Post
Elizabeth Hand
"More than a 1970s bohemian rhapsody, "Just Kids" is one of the best books ever written on becoming an artist -- not the race for online celebrity and corporate sponsorship that often passes for artistic success these days, but the far more powerful, often difficult journey toward the ecstatic experience of capturing radiance of imagination on a page or stage or photographic paper."
11/02/2010
Read Full Review
The Daily Telegraph
Michael Arditti
"…a touching tribute to their love as well as an incisive account of being young, ambitious and artistic in Seventies New York… [A] heartfelt, illuminating book."
11/02/2010
Read Full Review
The New York Times
Janet Maslin
"[She] casts off all verbal affectation and writes in a strong, true voice unencumbered by the polarizing mannerisms of her poetry. This Patti Smith, like the one in Steven Sebring’s haunting 2008 documentary “Patti Smith: Dream of Life,” is a newly mesmerizing figure, not quite the one her die-hard fans used to know."
11/02/2010
Read Full Review