The beat generation has continually elided easy classification and, as Elkholy explains in her introduction to The Philosophy of the Beats, “ ‘Beat’ encompasses such an array of meanings and contexts – cultural, social, literary, political, and philosophical – that an exact definition of the term is hard to establish” (1). In making a distinction between “Beat” as a literary movement and “beat” as a philosophy, this collection opens Beat studies to a scholarly audience that reaches far beyond literary criticism. Elkholy asserts that “beat sensibilities guide the transformative developments in progressive political thought, inspiring the ecology movement, new age spirituality, indigenous rights, minority and women's rights, and gay liberation” (5). This collection of essays is therefore necessarily ambitious in its scope, seeking as it does to include writings that range widely across the notion of Beat in order to identify the threads of a beat sensibility that run through many of these contemporary issues.

As the slipperiness of “beat” defies any neat grouping, the collection is arranged into four sections: “The Beats: Creating a Subculture,” “Beat Identities: Selfhood & Experimentation,” “Beat Avant-garde: Spontaneity and Immediacy,” and “Beat Politics: Ethics and Affinities.” These general titles enable Elkholy skilfully to cluster together writings that explore subjects as diverse as ethnicity, spontaneity, utopianism, existentialism, drugs, anarchism and ecology. These sections therefore provide some direction to the reader in order to navigate essays that could otherwise seem to have little in common. They also offer some thought-provoking juxtapositions and there is certainly much here that is insightful and fresh. There are excellent pieces on individual writers and artists who have often been overlooked, including Diane di Prima, Joanne Kyger, Charles Bukowski and Bob Kaufman. Whilst the majority of the essays focus on Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder, the writers and their works are often reframed in unpredictable ways in order to offer new and insightful perspectives. So, for example, Christopher Adamo's essay “proposes Jack Kerouac's On the Road as an exemplar of utopian thought that remains compatible with both the lineage of utopian thought and the basic tenets of political liberalism” (34). Similarly, Josh Michael Hayes explores the notion of home in Snyder's work in order to “provide a series of preliminary gestures that might at least lessen Snyder's uneasy relation to the Beats” (47).

This collection is also notable for presenting new research, particularly around film. So, for example, David Sterritt's essay, entitled “Wholly Communion: Poetry, Philosophy, and Spontaneous Bop Cinema,” presents Peter Whitehead's film Wholly Communion “as a vehicle for exploring the rhizomatic flux and nomadic, polyphonic flows that I see as quintessential aspects of Beat poetry and poetics” (147). Equally compelling is Jane Falk's study of Joanne Kyger's experimental video project Descartes, which relates Kyger's work to Beat avant-garde performance and in particular to Burroughs's Towers Open Fire. Falk contends that Kyger's work therefore “not only contributes to, but furthers, Beat multimedia aesthetics” (125).

The scope of The Philosophy of the Beats is perhaps best exemplified in A. Robert Lee's “Tongues Untied,” wherein he positions “the Beat body of literature as foreshadowing the debates and terms that will come to make up the field of multicultural studies” (100). Lee notes that

Lee's essay situates beatness within a broad cultural (and indeed physical) geography in order to recognize ethnicity within Beat writing. He offers a fluent examination of this in an essay that epitomizes the energy and scholarly enthusiasm that imbues this collection. Overall, The Philosophy of the Beats offers much to engage scholars of literature, film, cultural studies and philosophy. Not only is this an authoritative volume with contributions by several of the most respected academics of the Beats, but in exploring beatness in its very widest sense it also presents a wealth of innovative and original research.