The Long Slow Death of Jack Kerouac by Jim Christy (review)

518 letters in canada 1999 denominational hospitals during this period was how to maintain their religious roots and principles, while operating as publicly funded institutions, particularly when, as at Mount Sinai, most patients have been non-Jewish, or non-Catholic in St Mary's case. While Barsky's `coming-of-age novel' approach makes for a dramatic story, particularly for readers with connections to Mount Sinai, the limitations of her sources tend to dilute the historical value of her book for outside readers. Few primary documents are extant from the first half of Mount Sinai's history and Barsky had to rely on the recollections of surviving individuals, or their families, who were involved with the hospital. Such oral history is very valuable, but in the absence of primary documents from within and outside the hospital, personal memories can often be misleading and self-interested. One perspective that seems lacking is that of the provincial government, which had a growing interest in financing and regulating hospitals during this period. The Archives of Ontario has an extensive collection of microfilmed correspondence between the Ontario Department of Health and individual hospitals, but Barsky appears to have overlooked this primary source. Barsky does a good job of piecing together the history of Mount Sinai, although she has difficulty avoiding getting caught up in an heroic story populated by heroic individuals, especially great doctors. While I have no reason to diminish the contributions of anyone mentioned, they often appear to be more than human. There also tend to be too many names mentioned with little personality attached. A more critical and balanced approach would have been helpful, particularly if more voice was given to other individuals involved in running the hospital on a daily basis, including nurses, volunteers, key members of the hospital's administration, and some patients. Such criticisms, however, are difficult for a hospital historian to avoid, especially in light of the remarkable achievements of Mount Sinai over its first seventy-five years. Thus, within the context of the growing, though still quite uneven, historiography of Canadian hospitals, Barsky has made a useful contribution that should satisfy anyone connected with Mount Sinai. However, not unlike other such hospital histories, my own included, the challenge still remains of finding the right balance that will also satisfy outside readers, including, perhaps, overly critical medical historians. (CHRISTOPHER J. RUTTY) Jim Christy. The Long Slow Death of Jack Kerouac ECW 1998. 112. $12.95 The Long Slow Death of Jack Kerouac is a small volume with a whole lot of attitude. Writer and long-time Beat aficionado Jim Christy is, with much humanities 519 justification, mad as hell about the treatment that Jack Kerouac has received at the hands of the `official' custodians of Western culture (including its counterculture), and he ain't gonna take it anymore. `The first review of On the Road was the last good review, and bad reviews followed him to his grave,' Christy writes of Kerouac. `No serious writer has ever been so vilified.' Throughout this commentary on the life and works of Jack Kerouac, Christy offers some of his own reasons as to why a culture that has so easily assimilated so many of its other `rebel' figures, from Elvis to James Dean, still has so many problems with the man often identified as `King of the Beats.' Christy's main contention regarding the critical and/or academic squeamishness over Kerouac's prose art is that, as opposed to other writers to whom he is often (unfavourably) compared B Thomas Wolfe, James Joyce B Kerouac `was primarily a religious writer,' a mystic who wrote not polished works of art, but experience-books, `confessions' in the style of St Augustine. Kerouac's prose thus lacks the self-conscious artifice and cool authorial distance of the more well-wrought examples of twentiethcentury writing. As such, however, it possesses in its raw immediacy the power to convert: `I've spoken to people who, upon reading On the Road, immediately quit their jobs, their schools, and set out for adventure,' Christy writes admiringly. Kerouac, then, `wasn't a rebel [but] a cultural revolutionary' who `changed the way things are by being the way he...