Helpful Score: 4
Everyone must read this book, everyone who believes war is glamorous and glory is worth risking their life, everyone who takes their hands and feet for granted. Joe Bonham will change your perspective on life, death, and war. He will humble you to the point where you are thankful you have eyes and ears and a mouth. He gives voice to the poor guys who have fought and died for liberty and other men's ambitions since the beginning of time, and tells you what medals and honor mean to a dead man. Joe has no arms and no legs. World War One left him in a hospital room deaf, blind and dumb. Mr. Trumbo's gruesome novel was banned in America during several wars, but today his unforgetable anti-hero cannot be silenced. Joe screams without a mouth to tell us the only freedom worth fighting for is the freedom to live.
Helpful Score: 3
A very intense book, allows you to see the horror of war through the eyes of someone who is not brain dead, but whose body is so deformed that they can only live in their mind.
Helpful Score: 1
This is a fantastic book, one that was recomended to me and I shall recomend to others as well. This is a great read for anyone who takes their body for granted or believes that war is fun or glamorous. The stories told in this book are sad, scary and even funny at times. A must read for sure, this stays at the top of my favorites list !!
Helpful Score: 1
My favorite book that I have read so far this year (2009) and will most likely remain so. Both horrifying and stunningly beautiful, heart-breaking, claustrophobic, harrowing, and tragic beyond any words, etc, etc, etc. The depths this book reaches are incredible. This book is Truth. It will frighten you. It will force you to have to look at things in yourself and the world around you, you may not want to look at. I don't know maybe I'm just trying to sound like I'm some little book reviewer, blah blah blah blah blah blah. I do know though that this book has effected me to the point of feeling irreversibly haunted. Because there are people living like the main character in this book, right now, right this second in this country and all over the world. How can any of us sleep at night?
Helpful Score: 1
Johnny Got His Gun holds a place as one of the classic antiwar novels. First published in 1939, Dalton Trumbo's story of a young American soldier terribly maimed in WWI - he survives armless, legless and faceless, bur with mind intact - was an immediate bestseller. This fiercely moving novel was a rallying point for many Americans who came of age during WWII and it became perhaps the most powerful novel of protest during the Vietnam era.
