It's sad that there were so many women involved with the beat poets, but they're almost never talked about. Because it talks about so many people, each section is pretty short, but overall the author does a good job of writing succinct synopses of each person and it was nice to get to read some of their writing. My complaints are that I wish the girlfriends had gotten a little less page time so that the writers and artists could have had a little more, and I thought that some of what was written about the women wasn't worth the space and could have been replaced with something a little more relevant or interesting.