Bukowski in Pictures

Lots of pictures & worth the money. I bought mine at Borders--and don't regret it. Howard Sounes did a wonderful job of putting it all together. Even includes photos of some of Bukowski's old haunts (bars and such where he hung out), as well photos taken when he lived in various dives before he made it. Photos of his daughter Marina, photos of some of the women he dated--and even one of the great love of his life: Jane Cooney Baker. Not to be missed. Top notch all the way. I'd like to see them do a sequel to this. Get it if you can!

An excellent & well laid-out book displaying the life of Charles Bukowski. The book shows the real people & places depicted in Buk's poems & stories. It even has a photo of his grave which brings it home that such a lively individual is no longer with us even though new books of his unpublished/uncollected poems continue to be published. Alan/2001

This book is a must have for anyone who likes Buk. Fans will recognize many of the women that Buk wrote about in his novels and poems. My fave pict is the famous bust from "Women" and the sculptress who made it. Some of the pictures are mundane -- like the pict of Buk's refrigerator and picts from Philly around the time he lived here, but it's worth it. There are some fairly scary picts of Buk with his belly hanging out. The book gives perspective to Bukowski's life and his writing. (My other favorite picture is Buk with Shel Silverstein.)

Howard Sounes has created in photographs what he previously created in words, that is a highly entertaining and complete and even more important, truthful and factually correct account of the life and times of Mr Charles Bukowski. BUKOWSKI IN PICTURES begins with photos of the great writer as an infant, and ends with photos of his tombstone ("Don't Try" being etched into same) and very peaceful final resting place. Between the birth and death pictures are about 200 pages of around one thousand wonderful color and black & white pictures of Bukowski at every facet of his life, riding a pony as a kid, with grammar school classmates, with high school classmates, as a tot in his dad's arms, and on and on covering every year of his life right on to the final years as one of our planet's most successful scribes both financially and creatively. His huge lifetime body of published works remains unmatched, and when joined with his thousands of paintings, drawings, puts him in the same world class of mega-artists such as William Blake, Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, and the hundred or so other artist-giants of the human experience and experiment on Earth. Howard Sounes is up to the challenge. Sounes doesn't back down from describing the complete Bukowski, including those well documented horrible sides of Bukowski's character, which Sounes is able to fully analyze and comment upon in various captions to photos and the inclusion of consise paragraphs which this reviewer finds make this volume excel even more so. This is a very strong book worth twice as much at the bookstores than is being asked, in my opinion. A Bukowski fan can "read" through this volume with even more enjoyment than those more wordy biographies of Bukowski provide. All the cast of friends, legions of girlfriends, and wives and publishers of Bukowski works, literary peers and allies and even some literary enemies, are herein officially documented in the best photographs available. Luckily permissions to reprint were granted by all involved. History, Earth's most important and vital literary history, is the big winner here.