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by Goodloe Byron

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1591296641
• ISBN13: 9781591296645
• Release Date: December 2002
• Publisher: Publish America
• Length: 340 Pages
• Weight: 0.98 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.6" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Need more John Frido

John Frido is by far the coolest guy in the book. Who cares about the comma use, I'm talking character development here. This would have been a five-star book barring the drawn-out Olive portion... oh yeah... and more John Frido. There needs to be a book about just that guy. Ullysees is a sick character, John is too cool for school.

very complicated

This is a very complicated book. The two stories themselves not so much. Both Ulysses' and Olive's story are well written (olive's was a little depressing, but it was better written i think). Figuring out the connection between them is more the point of the book. The two strange sections (3 and 6) were really key to the whole thing. The essay at the beginning was pretty convincing as well. This seems to be the type of book that needs to be read a few times. All in all, i think it was great entertainment. In a hundred years it will probably be one of those 'masterpieces' that they make you read in school. Those aren't really my favorite type of book, but i think this is a good one. Its always nice to have a book to discuss, where mentioning it makes you look smart.

An Odyssey of the American road!

Start with the road trip, an American institution linked in our minds with youth, freedom, coming of age, and the joy and spontaneity of being out on the road without rules or deadlines. Add to that the forefathers and mothers of the Beat Generation-not the Beatniks later so vilified by their idols. Swirl in spirituality, drugs, frantic love, and frantic living-not violence, never violence-and the resulting mass seems almost like unmolded clay: there's a potential for greatness though unrealized. But removing the dross, the gray outside, there is within a beautiful gem, treasure to be found, a book, i by Goodloe Byron. Though "...the road is life," only about half to three-fourths of the book actually occurs on the road. The book focuses for the most part on Ulysses Limberto, his friend and inspiring force, Olive Berau, and their various relationships with various people from coast to coast. They love to hitchhike, have an affinity for hobos, spend a lot of time trying to "make" girls, and are constantly running from one wild, spiritual, improbable situation to the next with little accountability and few regrets. They're blown away by jazz, are constantly in search of that almost unreachable "IT," and tea to them doesn't mean the same thing as tea to me (some drugs have obscure slang names-who knew). One scary, or intriguing, thing to think about for those who've read the book already is that Byron himself once wrote in a letter about the book, "Every word of the story is true." Though I liked this book, I found within myself conflicting feelings about the story and characters. The practical side of me, some might say the nagging side, wonders if these people have parents or anything even remotely resembling a sense of responsibility for their actions or their consequences, because as far as I can tell, they don't. But there is another side of me that screams, "Amen, hallelujah, I want to do that when I grow up or at least before the week is out." There is something extremely refreshing and inspiring about the very freedom that Ulysses and Olive have. I am jealous of their ability to be able to leave their homes and jobs wherever they have settled in the county and go out and hitchhike thousands of miles away from stability into uncertainty. While some of the parts about life on the road are scary and ill advised, it seems like a great deal of fun and the adventure of a lifetime. Byron utilizes prose in his writing, imagination in his words, and profound insight spilling from the pages and his soul into the readers and their souls. It's about obsessions, abuse, depression, the absolute joy of friendship, moving, thinking, learning, manics, and life-living to the utmost, loving the living. It's life.

More entertaining than the Bible and less preachy too!

This exciting novel is a singular medley of naval observation, magazine article writing, satiric reflection upon the conventionalisms of civilized life, and rhapsody run mad. So far as the nautical parts are appropriate and unmixed, the portraiture is truthful and interesting. Some of the satire, especially in the early parts, is biting and reckless. The chapter spinning is various in character; now powerful from the vigorous and fertile fancy of the author, now little more than empty though sounding phrases. The rhapsody belongs to word-mongering where ideas are the staple; where it takes the shape of narrative or dramatic fiction, it is phantasmal -- an attempted description of what is impossible in nature and without probability in art; it repels the reader instead of attracting him. The "marvelous" injures the book by disjointing the narrative, as well as by its inherent want of interest, at least as managed by Mr. Byron. Mr. Byron's mysteries provoke wonder at the author rather than terror at the creation; the soliloquies and dialogues of Limberto, in which the author attempts delineating the wild imaginings of monomania, and exhibiting some profoundly speculative views of things in general, induce weariness or skipping; while the whole scheme mars, as we have said, the nautical continuity of story -- greatly assisted by various chapters of a bookmaking kind. The strongest point of the book is its "characters." Limberto, indeed, is a melodramatic exaggeration, and Berau is little more than a mouthpiece; but the harpooners, the mates, and several of the seamen, are truthful portraitures of the sailor as modified by the whaling service. It is a canon with some critics that nothing should be introduced into a novel, which it is physically impossible for the writer to have known: thus, he must not describe the conversation of miners in a pit if they all perish. Mr. Byron hardly steers clear of this rule, and he continually violates another, by beginning in the autobiographical form and changing ad libitum into the narrative. Such is the go-ahead method.