--- product_id: 734686696 title: "(smith).just kids" price: "€ 42.53" currency: EUR in_stock: true reviews_count: 13 url: https://www.desertcart.be/products/734686696-smith-just-kids store_origin: BE region: Belgium --- # (smith).just kids **Price:** € 42.53 **Availability:** ✅ In Stock ## Quick Answers - **What is this?** (smith).just kids - **How much does it cost?** € 42.53 with free shipping - **Is it available?** Yes, in stock and ready to ship - **Where can I buy it?** [www.desertcart.be](https://www.desertcart.be/products/734686696-smith-just-kids) ## Best For - Customers looking for quality international products ## Why This Product - Free international shipping included - Worldwide delivery with tracking - 15-day hassle-free returns ## Description Just kids. In each other Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith found kindred spirits and pursued their mutual dreams, from Brooklyn to the Chelsea Hotel into the world. Telling the story of two innocents who shed sheltered lives and braved the city in search of art and freedom, this work - part romance, part elegy - is about Review: Lovely, Heartbreaking, the Story of Love - 4.5 Stars ”It was the summer Coltrane died. The summer of “Crystal Ship.” Flower children raised their empty arms and China exploded the H-bomb. Jimi Hendrix set his guitar in flames in Monterey. AM radio played “Ode to Billie Joe.” There were riots in Newark, Milwaukee, and Detroit. It was the summer of Elvira Madigan, the summer of love. And in this shifting, inhospitable atmosphere, a chance encounter change the course of my life.” It was that summer when Patti Smith met Robert Mapplethorpe. Just Kids is a love story of these two young people who, against all odds, meet, fall in love, and cling to that love long after they’ve chosen other partners, other ways of life, and love. It’s a love story of the city where they fell in love, and perhaps even a bit of a love story to the art and poetry and music that was created in the course of their love story. They combined their meager possessions, but money was problematic, they barely made enough money for food – and frequently went without. Extras were out of reach. Books they had already owned were their prized possessions, as was their music limited to those albums they’d brought into this relationship. And still, they were able to enjoy some concerts just by virtue of being in the right place at the right time, or knowing the right person. ”Yet you could feel a vibration in the air, a sense of hastening. It had started with the moon, inaccessible poem that it was. Now men had walked upon it, rubber treads on a pearl of the gods.” There are a very few years that they were not in touch, Smith’s focused on her music career, her marriage to Fred “Sonic” Smith, and Mapplethorpe focused on his art, his partner. Time passes, children come along, and when Smith is expecting a second child, they re-establish communication. ”We were as Hansel and Gretel and we ventured out into the black forest of the world. There were temptations and witches and demons we never dreamed of and there was splendor we only partially imagined. No one could speak for these two young people nor tell with any truth of their days and nights together. Only Robert and I could tell it. Our story, as he called it. And having gone, he left the task for me to tell it to you.” I knew very little about Patti Smith, I knew who she was, is, and that I’ve heard some of her songs, knew she was a musician… beyond that, nothing. So, when this book first came out, and my brother sent me a signed copy of this, along with a few other books, and I vaguely recall seeing it and wondering why he sent it to me. And then, years later, also sent me a signed copy of M Train. I was beginning to feel a little guilty. I loved this. There’s a bit of that raw energy and the grittiness of living in their early days together, the descriptions of the city, especially at night. The Romeo and Julietness of it all. Beautiful prose. Their story reminded me of one of my favourite poems, Edna St. Vincent Millay’s ”Sonnet XXX – Love Is Not All” ”Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain; Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink And rise and sink and rise and sink again; Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath, Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone; Yet many a man is making friends with death Even as I speak, for lack of love alone. It well may be that in a difficult hour, Pinned down by pain and moaning for release, Or nagged by want past resolution’s power, I might be driven to sell your love for peace, Or trade the memory of this night for food. It well may be. I do not think I would.” Review: Required Reading - Top Dog Book Review: “Just Kids” by Patti Smith – This book has been sitting on my shelf for FAR too long. It is required reading for boomers born between 1945 and 1960 and anyone interested in the artistic cauldron that was New York City in the 60’s through the 80’s. It is about the long-standing relationship, friendship and devotion of Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe. Yeah, you may think you know Patti Smith, the G-L-O-R-I-A singer with the Keith Richard haircut and the snotty attitude. But you don’t know Patti. You may think you know Robert Mapplethorpe, he of the overtly sexual and overtly homosexual and S&M photographs. But you do not know Robert. This is a tale of art and artists. This is a tale of love and dedication. You know, there are all kinds of heroes. We have military heroes, but not everyone is cut out for military heroics. We have sports heroes, but not all of us are cut out for that, either. So, the best we all can do is to do what we can. This is NOT a discussion of the relative values of who does what. It is about realizing the full potential of whatever it is that you CAN be. And some people are artists. It can be a lonely life. A life filled with self-denial. How about a life where two people living together are hungry but they have enough money for only one hot dog and they split it? Do we spend money on art supplies or on food? And for what? Commercial success is far from a certainty. An early death is far more likely. “Nobody ever taught you how to live out on the street And now you’re gonna have to get used to it.” -- Bob Dylan This is a story about love. Deep, enduring, passionate love. Mutual respect. This is a lesson about value: that gifts from the heart far out value gifts with hefty price tags. Yes, I know that a lot of people out there are saying, “I’ll take the hefty price tag.” Part of me says, “then maybe this is NOT the book for you,” and another part of me says “then this IS the book for you.” Patti Smith’s writing is beautiful and skillful. She is, after all, a poet. She states at the end that there is much more to the story, but that this is the story that she chose to tell. It is not a biography. It is a love story; a real, true to life love story. So, maybe I’m in love with love. One more thing: there are those of us who love the music of Patti Smith and there is an adequate dose of that in the book. On page 245 are two sentences about her fears about music that I wish I had written: “We feared that the music which had given us sustenance was in danger of spiritual starvation. We feared it losing its sense of purpose, we feared it falling into fattened hands, we feared it falling into a mire of spectacle, finance and vapid technological complexity.” So, this 62 year old curmudgeon says welcome to the world of “American Idol” and “The Voice” and today’s world of performance art with its visuals and its staging and woe be to any five pimple faced teenagers who get together in a garage knowing four guitar chords and wanting to make music. Thank you Patti Smith. ## Technical Specifications | Specification | Value | |---------------|-------| | Best Sellers Rank | #3,373,755 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) | | Customer Reviews | 4.5 out of 5 stars 11,938 Reviews | ## Images ![(smith).just kids - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61SZH1+PalL.jpg) ## Customer Reviews ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Lovely, Heartbreaking, the Story of Love *by C***S on June 10, 2017* 4.5 Stars ”It was the summer Coltrane died. The summer of “Crystal Ship.” Flower children raised their empty arms and China exploded the H-bomb. Jimi Hendrix set his guitar in flames in Monterey. AM radio played “Ode to Billie Joe.” There were riots in Newark, Milwaukee, and Detroit. It was the summer of Elvira Madigan, the summer of love. And in this shifting, inhospitable atmosphere, a chance encounter change the course of my life.” It was that summer when Patti Smith met Robert Mapplethorpe. Just Kids is a love story of these two young people who, against all odds, meet, fall in love, and cling to that love long after they’ve chosen other partners, other ways of life, and love. It’s a love story of the city where they fell in love, and perhaps even a bit of a love story to the art and poetry and music that was created in the course of their love story. They combined their meager possessions, but money was problematic, they barely made enough money for food – and frequently went without. Extras were out of reach. Books they had already owned were their prized possessions, as was their music limited to those albums they’d brought into this relationship. And still, they were able to enjoy some concerts just by virtue of being in the right place at the right time, or knowing the right person. ”Yet you could feel a vibration in the air, a sense of hastening. It had started with the moon, inaccessible poem that it was. Now men had walked upon it, rubber treads on a pearl of the gods.” There are a very few years that they were not in touch, Smith’s focused on her music career, her marriage to Fred “Sonic” Smith, and Mapplethorpe focused on his art, his partner. Time passes, children come along, and when Smith is expecting a second child, they re-establish communication. ”We were as Hansel and Gretel and we ventured out into the black forest of the world. There were temptations and witches and demons we never dreamed of and there was splendor we only partially imagined. No one could speak for these two young people nor tell with any truth of their days and nights together. Only Robert and I could tell it. Our story, as he called it. And having gone, he left the task for me to tell it to you.” I knew very little about Patti Smith, I knew who she was, is, and that I’ve heard some of her songs, knew she was a musician… beyond that, nothing. So, when this book first came out, and my brother sent me a signed copy of this, along with a few other books, and I vaguely recall seeing it and wondering why he sent it to me. And then, years later, also sent me a signed copy of M Train. I was beginning to feel a little guilty. I loved this. There’s a bit of that raw energy and the grittiness of living in their early days together, the descriptions of the city, especially at night. The Romeo and Julietness of it all. Beautiful prose. Their story reminded me of one of my favourite poems, Edna St. Vincent Millay’s ”Sonnet XXX – Love Is Not All” ”Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain; Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink And rise and sink and rise and sink again; Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath, Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone; Yet many a man is making friends with death Even as I speak, for lack of love alone. It well may be that in a difficult hour, Pinned down by pain and moaning for release, Or nagged by want past resolution’s power, I might be driven to sell your love for peace, Or trade the memory of this night for food. It well may be. I do not think I would.” ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Required Reading *by T***G on August 27, 2014* Top Dog Book Review: “Just Kids” by Patti Smith – This book has been sitting on my shelf for FAR too long. It is required reading for boomers born between 1945 and 1960 and anyone interested in the artistic cauldron that was New York City in the 60’s through the 80’s. It is about the long-standing relationship, friendship and devotion of Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe. Yeah, you may think you know Patti Smith, the G-L-O-R-I-A singer with the Keith Richard haircut and the snotty attitude. But you don’t know Patti. You may think you know Robert Mapplethorpe, he of the overtly sexual and overtly homosexual and S&M photographs. But you do not know Robert. This is a tale of art and artists. This is a tale of love and dedication. You know, there are all kinds of heroes. We have military heroes, but not everyone is cut out for military heroics. We have sports heroes, but not all of us are cut out for that, either. So, the best we all can do is to do what we can. This is NOT a discussion of the relative values of who does what. It is about realizing the full potential of whatever it is that you CAN be. And some people are artists. It can be a lonely life. A life filled with self-denial. How about a life where two people living together are hungry but they have enough money for only one hot dog and they split it? Do we spend money on art supplies or on food? And for what? Commercial success is far from a certainty. An early death is far more likely. “Nobody ever taught you how to live out on the street And now you’re gonna have to get used to it.” -- Bob Dylan This is a story about love. Deep, enduring, passionate love. Mutual respect. This is a lesson about value: that gifts from the heart far out value gifts with hefty price tags. Yes, I know that a lot of people out there are saying, “I’ll take the hefty price tag.” Part of me says, “then maybe this is NOT the book for you,” and another part of me says “then this IS the book for you.” Patti Smith’s writing is beautiful and skillful. She is, after all, a poet. She states at the end that there is much more to the story, but that this is the story that she chose to tell. It is not a biography. It is a love story; a real, true to life love story. So, maybe I’m in love with love. One more thing: there are those of us who love the music of Patti Smith and there is an adequate dose of that in the book. On page 245 are two sentences about her fears about music that I wish I had written: “We feared that the music which had given us sustenance was in danger of spiritual starvation. We feared it losing its sense of purpose, we feared it falling into fattened hands, we feared it falling into a mire of spectacle, finance and vapid technological complexity.” So, this 62 year old curmudgeon says welcome to the world of “American Idol” and “The Voice” and today’s world of performance art with its visuals and its staging and woe be to any five pimple faced teenagers who get together in a garage knowing four guitar chords and wanting to make music. Thank you Patti Smith. ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ just scrappy little urchins who ended up counterculture icons, that's all *by B***S on April 15, 2013* Just Kids by Patti Smith is a rare little gem. To me, Patti Smith has always exuded a punk rock swagger, an only half-bridled aggression. I see her, and I see only the hard, sharp angles of her. And Robert Mapplethorpe: leather, whips, unapologetic sex acts with a peculiar defiant dignity to them. Both of them are creatures who seem to have been launched straight from the scene, fully-formed and antagonistic right from the start. But they weren't. Just Kids is a memoir by Patti Smith about her time living in New York with Robert Mapplethorpe while they were both shaking off the dull scraps of adolescence and trying to break out as artists. Strewn throughout the book are pictures of them as very young excitable artists-in-training joined at the hip. Smith's prose reads like a soft-focus fairy tale. The sections set in the Chelsea Hotel, especially, have an almost Dickensian quality to them; they read as a quaint story full of larger-than-life characters, most of whom have hearts firmly of gold. Reconciling this wistful retelling of her youth with the persona I associate with her was intriguing to say the least. And obviously I am not the only one who found the disconnect between Patti Smith's presence and her internal life jarring - there are places in the text where she discusses how those around her took her for a lesbian (she is straight), or a junkie (she seems not to have experimented with pot until she'd moved out of the Chelsea). Her prose is light and airy, and her memories sepia-tinged and wholesome, despite the fact that anyone who knows the history of that scene knows just how much death and self-immolation is happening just off screen. Patti Smith herself seems to have waltzed through it unscathed, and her writing dances along the edges of the darkness that her scene held*. Without the debauchery, the excess, the Chelsea Hotel in the 70s reads as an almost Victorian affair. The book is structured in a circle: it opens with the moment Smith hears of Mapplethorpe's death, then jumps back in time before they have met. Smith discusses her teenage pregnancy and the process of giving her child up for adoption, her failure at teacher's school, and her time on a New Jersey assembly line in a brisk and somewhat sanitized fashion; again, there seems to be in her writing a distaste for discussions of the negative, of the hard and bleak moments of her life. From there, the book jumps forward to her first meeting with Mapplethorpe, their sweet and heartfelt romance, the little poverty-stricken life they build together, and how hard they worked to evolve their relationship with each other when their life trajectories began to diverge. The book ends with a far jump into the future, back to those last few weeks of Mapplethorpe's life and ends with his inevitable death, right back where the book started. Given that the book is told from Smith's perspective, it is perhaps not surprising that her motives and desires are clear throughout, but over the course of the book Mapplethorpe becomes more and more opaque. A boy who seems simple when she first meets him grows into a man full of contradictions. The person whose viewpoints and life goals seemed to mirror hers so closely at first winds up yearning to be part of the social circles that Smith herself actively avoids. It became increasingly unsettling as I read the book. What does he get from her that keeps him around? How does he see her and their ever-changing relationship? Very little is explored here in the text, and Smith herself seems to take their relationship at face value, as a thing complete in itself with little context surrounding it. It just is for her, and her wholesale acceptance of it is so radically different from the way I, personally, live out my significant life-altering relationships that it was hard for me to understand at times what their relationship was exactly. But there is an authenticity to her writing that explains the halcyon haze through which she remembers that time of her life. That period, above anything else, was her period with Robert Mapplethorpe, for whom she had a love so total and accepting it is essentially blank, without specificities, and all the hardness of that time is drowned out in remembrance of him. Just Kids is, like most memoirs, ultimately a work that says as much or more about its author than the subject matter itself. The story there is as much in the telling as it is in the content. And it's a fascinating look into the mind of a woman who is so very different than the person I assumed her to be. It is a love letter to the late Robert Mapplethorpe, but it's a love letter to her young self, as well. I can't help but wish there had been some balance to it, some acknowledgment of the difficulties of living so poor, or of loving a man who seems to fall into and out of and into and out of love with her, or of the pain of watching her friends get consumed by drugs right in front of her, but that's not the book she wrote. It may not be a book she's able to write. I can't help but think of her as an unreliable narrator for her own life, but ultimately that's what we all are. It's hard to tell the bald truth about your own life. It might be impossible. But still, the unanswered questions nag at me. I found this book absolutely fascinating, but when it was over, it felt insubstantial. But that doesn't mean it's not worth reading. *Swimming Underground by Mary Woronov of Warhol's Factory crew is a bird's eye account of the dark addictions Patti Smith seems to prefer to keep just out of frame. I highly recommend it, too, and it works as a very interesting counterbalance to Just Kids. ## Frequently Bought Together - (smith).just kids - The Bell Jar (Modern Classics) - Milk Teeth --- ## Why Shop on Desertcart? - 🛒 **Trusted by 1.3+ Million Shoppers** — Serving international shoppers since 2016 - 🌍 **Shop Globally** — Access 737+ million products across 21 categories - 💰 **No Hidden Fees** — All customs, duties, and taxes included in the price - 🔄 **15-Day Free Returns** — Hassle-free returns (30 days for PRO members) - 🔒 **Secure Payments** — Trusted payment options with buyer protection - ⭐ **TrustPilot Rated 4.5/5** — Based on 8,000+ happy customer reviews **Shop now:** [https://www.desertcart.be/products/734686696-smith-just-kids](https://www.desertcart.be/products/734686696-smith-just-kids) --- *Product available on Desertcart Belgium* *Store origin: BE* *Last updated: 2026-05-13*