WESTWORDS

Beat Poets

Edited by Carmela Ciuraru

Alfred A. Knopf: 236 pp., $12.50

“Kerouac opened a million coffee bars,” quipped Beat novelist William S. Burroughs about the so-called King of the Beat Generation, “and sold a million pairs of Levi’s to both sexes.” But the fact is that far more people talk about the Beats than read their work, which is exactly why Carmela Ciuraru’s “Beat Poets,” a title in the Everyman’s Pocket Poets series, is such an essential volume. Here are excerpts from all of the famous Beats and a great many who are unknown but worthy, ranging from Ray Bremser’s “City Madness” to John Wieners’ “A Poem for the Insane.” As a kind of counterweight to the poetry itself, Ciuraru closes out the collection with excerpts from the letters and other writings of Kerouac, Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

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The Free Speech Movement

Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s

Edited by Robert Cohen and Reginald E. Zelnik

University of California Press: 620 pp., $55; $19.95 paper

To understand what it was like to come of age in the ‘60s, to understand how America changed in profound and revolutionary ways, we need to be reminded of what was really at stake when the banner of the Free Speech Movement was raised in Sproul Plaza at the Berkeley campus of the University of California. The editors of “The Free Speech Movement” have assembled a kind of colloquium-in-print that allows us to hear the voices of the men and women who figured prominently in the movement as well as the scholars who have reflected on its effect on history. The result is an impressive work of scholarship enlivened by moments of bittersweet memoir that will resonate powerfully for readers of a certain age.

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Golden State, Golden Youth

The California Image in Popular Culture, 1955-1966

Kirse Granat May

University of North Carolina Press: 256 pp., $18.95 paper

Historian Kirse Granat May digs through the accumulation of cliches and conventional wisdom about California youth culture and reveals how the whole phenomenon can be seen as the handiwork of media and marketing entrepreneurs, driven by profit motive and something much deeper and darker -- the fear of class, race and generational conflict. Wholly fascinating in its savvy take on the making and manipulation of pop culture, Kirse’s study is a lively exercise in the deconstruction of beach movies, coonskin caps, surf music and even Annette Funicello’s famous one-piece swimsuit.

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The High Sierra of California

Gary Snyder and Tom Killion

Heyday Books/Yosemite Assn.: 128 pp., $50

Beat poetry may seem to boil up out of the mean streets of America, but there is also a pastoral tradition among the Beats, and it is richly evoked and honored in “The High Sierra of California” by Gary Snyder and Tom Killion, a highly elegant mating of Snyder’s poems and trail-notes, excerpts from the writings of naturalist John Muir and the superb and often stunning woodcuts of printer and printmaker Killion. The hand-carved wood and linoleum block prints -- sometimes stately and solemn, sometimes mysterious and mystical, sometimes rollicking and even slightly ribald -- are the visual equivalent of Snyder’s poetry and the real glory of the book.

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Insurgent Muse

Life and Art at the Woman’s Building

Terry Wolverton

City Lights Books: 244 pp., $17.95 paper

The now-defunct Woman’s Building in downtown Los Angeles was ground zero in the feminist art movement for some 16 years. As seen through the eyes of Terry Wolverton -- artist, poet, novelist, teacher and one of the enduring literary lights of Los Angeles -- the Woman’s Building was “a collision of history and politics and art,” a place where women were beginning to make new demands on themselves and the world around them. For Wolverton herself, the Woman’s Building encouraged an intimate journey toward self-discovery and self-definition as a lesbian and an artist. “When people wonder at the meaning the Woman’s Building continues to have for me, they must consider that my story there began with resurrection, and I came to it mucky and tender and quivering as any newborn.”

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The John Fante Reader

Edited by Stephen Cooper

William Morrow: 366 pp., $25.95

John Fante is one of those tragic figures of arts and letters whose best work was cruelly overlooked in his own lifetime, only to be “discovered” and celebrated long after his death. His novels and short stories, the best of which are excerpted here, are now compared favorably with Henry Miller and Ernest Hemingway. Set mostly in Southern California, and spanning a period from the Depression to the early 1980s, the writing collected in “The John Fante Reader” allows us to see the world through the eyes of a man who was wholly free of sentiment and self-deception and yet who was fascinated by his own origins and afire with his own passions.

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The Memory Room

A Novel

Mary Rakow

Counterpoint: 512 pp., $26

To describe “The Memory Room” as a novel of a woman in midlife crisis fails to capture the lofty ambition and high achievement embodied in Mary Rakow’s first novel. At the dark heart of “The Memory Room” are the woman’s memories of the outrage that she suffered as a young child. The weapons she uses to keep her demons at bay are art, horticulture, music, psychology, the Bible and, above all, poetry. A compelling storyteller, Rakow takes a certain moral risk in equating the private horror of sexual abuse with the vast grotesqueries of the Holocaust: “All cruelty is the same,” says Barbara, the principal character. But what distinguishes Rakow’s novel from less accomplished work is the sheer abundance of literary ornamentation and invention. “All art is this,” she writes. “All art is memory.”

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The Republic of East L.A.

Stories

Luis J. Rodriguez

Rayo/HarperCollins: 240 pp., $23.95

Luis J. Rodriguez is best known for his memoir of gang life, “Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A.,” but his new collection of short fiction represents yet another experiment in devising a language that will enable him to describe the experience of the barrio to his readers. He delights in exploring the cross-wired cultures that sizzle and pop on the street of East Los Angeles by showing us figures of valor and courage and moments of grace and redemption.

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Route 66

The Romance of the West

Thomas Arthur Repp

Mock Turtle Press: 214 pp., $34.95

Here and there along Route 66, the most famous highway in America, a few visionaries saw a way to separate the travelers from their dimes and dollars, and their sideshow antics are celebrated in Thomas Arthur Repp’s scrapbook of Route 66 memorabilia, “Route 66: The Romance of the West.” Colorful and kinetic in its presentation, full of arresting images and packed with tales told with a wink and a nod by various old coots and charming rogues, “Route 66” is clearly intended to satisfy an appetite for nostalgia, but it can be approached as a serious study of American pop culture disguised as a coffee-table book.

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Ruth Harriet Louise and

Hollywood Glamour

Photography

Robert Dance and Bruce Robertson

University of California Press/Santa Barbara

Museum of Art: 286 pp., $65; $35 paper

When she joined Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1925 at the age of 22, Ruth Harriet Louise was the only woman in Hollywood working as a chief studio photographer. Often surprising and always fascinating, “Ruth Harriet Louise and Hollywood Glamour Photography” is a biography of Louise, a history of portrait photography in the early years of the Hollywood studio system and a showcase for some of her most accomplished and memorable images. Drawing from the 100,000 negatives that she created during her short career, the authors point out that Louise’s work amounts to the purest expression of the culture she helped to create: “the definitive image of Hollywood beauty and glamour.”