"Smith lovingly depicts the denizens of the Chelsea Hotel - is that Janis Joplin at the bar? - and the rock club CBGB, all the while pondering how to be an uncompromising artist who nonetheless needs to pay the rent." - Boston Globe
"[Just Kids] reminds us that innocence, utopian ideals, beauty and revolt are enlightenment's guiding stars in the human journey. Her book recalls, without blinking or faltering, a collective memory – one that guides us through the present and into the future." - Michael Stipe, Time magazine
"Possibly the most spellbinding account of New York in the '70's ever written." - Dua Lipa
"Sometimes there is justice in the world. That was my first thought when I heard that Patti Smith had won the National Book Award this fall for her glorious memoir, Just Kids." - Maureen Corrigan's favorite books of 2010, NPR's Fresh Air
"Reading rocker Smith's account of her relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, it's hard not to believe in fate. How else to explain the chance encounter that threw them together, allowing both to blossom? Quirky and spellbinding." - People, Top 10 Books of 2010
"Smith's beautifully crafted love letter to her friend Robert Mapplethorpe functions as a memento mori of a relationship fueled by passion for art and writing. Her elegant eulogy lays bare the chaos and the creativity so embedded in that earlier time and in Mapplethorpe's life and work." - Publishers Weekly, Top Ten Books of the Year
"A spellbinding portrait of bohemian New York in the late 1960s and early '70s." - New York Times Book Review, Paperback Row
"The most enchantingly evocative memoir of funky-but-chic New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s that any alumnus has yet committed to print." - Janet Maslin's top 10 books of 2010, New York Times
"Composed of incandescent sentences more revelatory than anything from Patti Smith's poems or songs, her romantic memoir also reveals what blunt narrative instruments the earlier career bios of her and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe have been." - Village Voice, Best Books of 2010 Round-Up
"Poetically written and vividly remembered. [Smith] reminded me of the idealism of art." - Matthew Weiner, creator of MAD MEN, in New York magazine
"Just Kids shows how Smith integrated the romance of her twenty-year friendship with Mapplethorpe with her historical preoccupations, elevating them to an almost sacred status. The past, for Smith, has always driven her life forward. If only we could all be so free-spirited." - The Rumpus
"A revelation. In a spellbinding memoir as notable for its restraint as for its lucidity, its wit as well as its grace, Smith tells the story of how she and Robert Mapplethorpe found each other... beautifully crafted, vivid, and indelible." - Booklist
"An utterly charming, captivating, intimate portrait of a late 1960s and early 1970s period of intense artistic ferment in downtown Manhattan significantly shaped and keenly observed by rock firebrand Smith...Just Kids presents a poet-rocker recounting the salad days in a clear, commanding prose voice that's recognizably her own, but not quite so mysterious and mystical as the one heard in the music...Just Kids is a sweet story of two luminously talented outsiders awkwardly finding their way, together." - Philadelphia Inquirer
"An utterly charming, captivating, intimate portrait of a late 1960s and early 1970s period of intense artistic ferment in downtown Manhattan significantly shaped and keenly observed by rock firebrand Smith." - Philadelphia Inquirer
"One of the best books ever written on becoming an artist...Jesus may have died for somebody's sins, but Patti Smith lives and writes and sings for all of us." - Washington Post
