© Copyright Deborah Baker 2011. All rights reserved.
Language: English
256 pages
Publisher: The Penguin Press (April 10, 2008)
Hardcover
ISBN-10: 1594201587
ISBN-13: 978-1594201585
Price: $25.95
Paperback
ISBN-10: 0143114832
ISBN-13: 978-0143114833
Price: $15.00
Publisher: Penguin India
ISBN: 9780670082285
Price: Rs 499
ISBN - 9780143416890
(paperback)
Price: Rs 299
In 1961 Allen Ginsberg left New York by boat
for Bombay, India. He brought with him his
troubled lover, Peter Orlovsky, and a plan to meet
up with poets Gary Snyder and Joanne Kyger. He
left behind not only fellow Beats Jack Kerouac,
Gregory Corso, and William Burroughs, but also
the relentless notoriety that followed his
publication of "Howl", the epic work that branded
him the voice of a generation.
Drawing from extensive research in India,
undiscovered letters, journals, and memoirs,
acclaimed biographer Deborah Baker has woven a
many layered literary mystery out of Ginsberg's
odyssey. A Blue Hand follows him and his
companions as they travel from the ashrams of the
Himalayan foothills to Delhi opium dens and the
burning pyres of Benares. They encounter an India
of charlatans and saints, a country of spectacular
beauty and spiritual promise and of devastating
poverty and political unease.
In Calcutta, Ginsberg discovers a circle of
hungry young writers whose outrageousness and
genius are uncannily reminiscent of his own past.
Finally, Ginsberg searches for Hope Savage, the
mysterious and beautiful girl whose path, before
she disappeared, had crossed his own in
Greenwich Village, San Francisco, and Paris.
In their restless, comic and oftimes tortured
search for meaning, the Beats looked to India for
answers while India looked to the West. A Blue
Hand is the story of their search for God, for love,
and for peace in the shadow of the atomic bomb. It
is also a story of India-its gods and its poets, its
politics and its place in the American imagination.
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“A fabulous book - comic,
tragic, and written with
great verve and nerve -
about the Beats and their
'passage to India'. It is a
remarkable saga of various
lives and stories all drawn
together by Deborah Baker
- the biographer as
adventurer.”
Michael Ondaatje
A Blue Hand
The Beats in India
