From Bookforum, Roamin' Legions: Fifty years after the publication of On the Road, the question remains: Where was Kerouac going? (and more, and more from American Heritage). The Beats gave us a plague of lazy writers: Like it or not, they're responsible for turning impressionable young males into seriously bad authors. From TLS, a review of The Company They Keep: C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien as writers in community by Diana Pavlac Glyer; a review of Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the margin of my time by Clive James; and 150 years after the birth of Joseph Conrad, a look back to E. V. Lucas's 1907 review of The Secret Agent — a book which reminds us "how simple men really are". A review of The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad by John Stape.  A review of Joseph Conrad: His Moral Vision, by George A. Panichas. 

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