An outside look at the beats

I read a book awhile back called When I was Cool. This book is really a memoir of the author named Sam Kashner. He writes of his time as the first student at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. This book while written about several of the beats after their hey day gave a bit of a different perspective of what I had read in any of their own works and gave a livelier look of their later years than many of their biographies.

The beats that show up in this book are Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, William Burroughs Sr. and Jr., Anne Waldman, and Peter Orlovsky.

This was a really interesting read and I would recommend it to anyone that enjoys reading books by any of the beats.