content: I'm amazed at how many people find the Dharma Bums worth reading. It's Kerouac at his flattest. The sentences lack his usual energy and lyrical beauty, there is virtually no action and the Buddhist philosophy feels pasted on and contrived. This is definitely not a Kerouac book to recommend. Readers would to better to pick up a copy of Desolation Angels or (excepting the 140 pages of transcribed conversation in the middle) Visions of Cody. If you've already read lots of Kerouac and you want to move on to a modern counterpart, pick up Vincent Czyz's Adrift in a Vanishing City ... lyrical, experimental, hot-house writing that takes a quick-talkin drifter out of his native Kansas as far afield as Berlin, Mexico City and Paris. And through it all, he never loses his vernacular, even when waxin metaphysical. You might also try sliding over to Henry Miller ... not Tropic of Cancer, which is his most popular, but Sexus, which is far better written.