“Fascinating, informative, engaging, exceptionally well written, "City Lights: Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Biography of a Bookstore" is the seminal and absorbing history of an iconic bookstore, its press, and the inimitable Lawrence Ferlinghetti. This must be considered essential reading for those whose favorite pastime is browsing through independent bookshops. . .”
—Midwest Book Review
“Make no mistake. Woods is no flame thrower. She honors and respects City Lights and Ferlinghetti, as much if not more than any other fan or citizen of the world or fan. But she offers a new and radical perspective on Ferlinghetti and on the bookstore he co-founded in 1953 with Peter Martin . . . There’s no one way to view Ferlinghetti. Woods portrays him as perhaps he would want to be portrayed: as a lifelong foe of censorship and government authority and authorities who continued to grow intellectually and emotionally.”
—Jonah Raskin, CounterPunch
“In City Lights: Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Biography of a Bookstore, Gioia Woods gifts her readers with a lively and wide-ranging cultural history of an institution that, over seventy years after its founding, still stands as a vital site of literary dissent in the United States and beyond. In Woods’s hands, the story of City Lights reminds us that other worlds are possible.”
—Alex Trimble Young, Barrett Honors College, Arizona State University
“City Lights is arguably the first work of its kind to present a comprehensive history of City Lights Bookstore and its press as a cultural institution. Not only that, but its international scope will appeal to a more globally aware generation through its expansion of counterculture to include environmentalism and the exploration of gender and sexual identities.”
—Robert Bennett, professor of English, Montana State University, author of Deconstructing Post-WWII New York City: The Literature, Art, Jazz, and Architecture of an Emerging Global Capital
