Charles Bukowski

Barry Miles has covered a lot of ground in his life. Someone should wrtie a book about him. But when it comes to Bukowski I am in a strange position. I corresponded with him in a minor way. (He wrote me 20 times, I wrote him about 55) I own a bookstore in San Francisco where I've gotten to know many people whom Bukowski knew well. Neeli Cherkovski works down the street at New College. Harold Norse lives on my block and will be turning 90 in two weeks. John Bryan is a regular fixture. Jack Micheline painted the back room. Linda King sculped the head of A.D. Winans in my store. But my point being that unless you know better it is very very difficult to know if a biographer is on target. You might get distracted by purely trivial things...you might like the writing and decide it also must be acurate. Often it is not. But look the essence is did he fairly and acurately capture the man? For me Barry Miles book is definately the best. For instance he covers Bukowsk's bad habit of hatcheting old freinds. Like Jon Webb and John Bryan. He gets so many things so right. Yes he slips a bit now and then but I kept reading this biography and marveled at how he nailed one thing after another. Jesus he must have read 10,000 Bukowski letters carefully. Well, ok, he didn't mention how I wrote Bukowski and convienced him to buy a MacIntosh computer. Which I did. I forgive him. But Miles has written an excellent work well worth buying.

With so many works on the life of Bukowski out there, I was skeptical about this new biography. However, I have read many other good bios by Miles, and was looking forward to this one. It did not leave me disappointed. The best way to get to know Bukowski is through his numerous autobiographical writings, but I enjoyed this independent take on his life. Unlike Cherkovski's biography of Buk, this book is written by someone who was not intimately familiar with the man. That, in and of itself, was refreshing. Miles is a competent biographer, and at times his resourcefulness for following through with sources and information really come through in the book. The reward for the reader is some new information on Buk that I hadn't read before elsewhere. The book does have some weaknesses. This book does pull from most of the expected sources a Buk reader would expect, like "Ham on Rye" and interviews, so some of it is repetitious. But Bukowski teetered on the edge of vagrancy most of his life, so you can imagine tracking down a paper trail of facts after his death is not an easy task. Also, at times the author, I think, makes some stretches in his conclusions. But on the whole I thought it was a fresh and balanced look at the life of Bukowski. I think that this will become the preferred biography of Buk over the Cherkovski biography.