"Ferlinghetti has not just survived for a century: He epitomizes the American culture of that century. Specifically, he has been a unique protagonist in a national drama: the American struggle to imagine a democratic culture.... Is Ferlinghetti’s career as an influential, best-selling poet a story of high culture or of popular culture? Is his City Lights, as bookstore and publisher, a San Francisco tourist trap? Or is City Lights a literary, moral and legal shrine that not only published Frank O’Hara’s 'Lunch Poems' and Allen Ginsberg’s 'Howl and Other Poems' but in a 1957 court case established First Amendment principles that transformed American life? The store’s North Beach location has been designated an 'official' San Francisco landmark. Is that a funny contradiction in terms? Or a triumph? The answer to all these questions is, emphatically, yes - all of the above.... The story of Little Boy echo[es] a great national question.... Who, little boys and girls, juvenile yet old, do we think we are?" (Robert Pinsky, The New York Times Book Review)

“Wonderfully effusive [and] stunningly evocative.... This book is a Proustian celebration of both memory and moments that will delight readers.” (Publishers Weekly)

"A volcanic explosion of personal memories, political rants, social commentary, environmental jeremiads and cultural analysis all tangled together in one breathless sentence that would make James Joyce proud.... [Ferlinghetti is] the silliest, angriest, kindest, smartest man you’ve ever heard - a whirling dervish of scholarly asides, literary allusions, corny puns and twisted aphorisms.... No one alive carries the history, the writers, the personal experience of 20th-century literature in his mind as Ferlinghetti does.... There’s something hypnotic about Ferlinghetti’s relentless commentary, a style that amuses him, too.... If you're willing to let go, he'll win you over." (Ron Charles, The Washington Post)