Helpful Score: 1
This book was a very interesting insight into Mr. Vonnegut's mind. A lifetime of experiences which he shares in short little musings. I really enjoy his other works so I was excited to find this book of his. He shares his thoughts on society, the future, politics, just about everything and shares anecdotal stories from his past that helped shape him into the man and author he has become. If you like his other books I would recommend giving this book a read. This was not a difficult read at all.
Helpful Score: 1
This book serves as a good example of what happens when one lets one's brilliant accomplishments in one field cause one to think, "I must be brilliant in all fields!" The guy is indisputably a brilliant fiction author. He needs to take an economics class before writing this sort of thing, though. It reminds me of watching my old professors get drunk and blather on about stuff they knew nothing about in other fields.
A classic author. This book is full of satire but also humorous and tender. A collection of letters about the soul of America today, published in 2005.
I love Vonnegut. This seemed to be more a rant against Bush than his usual humor, though.
I watched a PBS interview with Kurt Vonnegut and they were talking about this book. I found him to be a very interesting and satirical man. I had never heard of him before and was intrigued by watching him.
There were many times throughout the book that I thought to myself "that is exactly what I was thinking." I liked that he was not afraid to say what he felt and I got the feeling that he didn't care who heard him.
This book lead me into my quest for reading all Kurt Vonnegut...more I watched a PBS interview with Kurt Vonnegut and they were talking about this book. I found him to be a very interesting and satirical man. I had never heard of him before and was intrigued by watching him.
There were many times throughout the book that I thought to myself "that is exactly what I was thinking." I liked that he was not afraid to say what he felt and I got the feeling that he didn't care who heard him.
This book lead me into my quest for reading all Kurt Vonnegut I can get my hands on. I am looking forward to reading much more in the future.
There were many times throughout the book that I thought to myself "that is exactly what I was thinking." I liked that he was not afraid to say what he felt and I got the feeling that he didn't care who heard him.
This book lead me into my quest for reading all Kurt Vonnegut...more I watched a PBS interview with Kurt Vonnegut and they were talking about this book. I found him to be a very interesting and satirical man. I had never heard of him before and was intrigued by watching him.
There were many times throughout the book that I thought to myself "that is exactly what I was thinking." I liked that he was not afraid to say what he felt and I got the feeling that he didn't care who heard him.
This book lead me into my quest for reading all Kurt Vonnegut I can get my hands on. I am looking forward to reading much more in the future.
Ah, Vonnegut. What an incredible author. I don't always agree with him politically, but he has a grasp of the human condition that is spot on. His amazing prose is sprinkled with wit and humor (often gallows humor), while at the heart of his message, he holds up a mirror and dares us to confront life and ourselves as we really are.
Kurt is up in heaven now.
Well, not really. He even wrote about that dubious prospect, about page 80, that, as a humanist who didn't believe in either divine reward or punishment, "if I should ever die, God forbid, I hope you will say 'Kurt is up in heaven now.' That's my favorite joke." He first lobbed it at an audience at illustrious science fiction writer and fellow humanist Isaac Asimov's memorial service, where he spoke, at one point stating that "Isaac is up in heaven now," which was evidently "the funniest thing I could have said in a roomful of humanists. I rolled them in the aisles. It was several minutes before order could be restored."
I believe it.
Really, how could I review Kurt Vonnegut's work? Easy: I won't. The following short statement on what I would consider to be his second magnum opus will have to suffice. The title is somewhat misleading. It has much less to do with being stateless and far more to do with being in a state of perpetual wonderment (or confusion), a nod to his self-described (dis)organized religious order (Our Lady of Perpetual Astonishment). Herein, one of the greatest writers in American history offers his musings on life, and loss... and, a word of warning: they ain't pretty. They are, however, profound, poignant, and, disturbingly terminal. Understandably, for a variety of reasons, Kurt Vonnegut never could never see the world through rose-colored glasses, at least as an adult. His experiences during the war were just too traumatic, but he channeled that trauma into a body of work that is nothing short of sublime, if painfully cynical.
There's no doubt that Slaughterhouse Five was Vonnegut's literary rendition of Picasso's Guernica, and will always be that one piece that can never be equalled, for the work it accomplished and the generations it has moved, his "glacier book," but A Man Without A Country is just as priceless. I love when I don't gotta guess: according to Vonnegut himself, "this book is about congenitally defective human beings of a sort that is making the whole country and many other parts of the planet go completely haywire nowadays. These were people born without consciences, and suddenly they are taking charge of everything. PPs [AKA psychopathic personalities] are presentable, they know full well the suffering their actions may cause others, but they do not care. They cannot care, because they are nuts. They have a screw loose."
In a series of collected accounts, more vignettes than a collection of essays, as this book is sometimes described, Vonnegut pontificates, hilariously and movingly, about his views on the world and its current state of affairs, especially in the wake of the Bush presidency, in his unique and, here in particular, incisive style. It has the prototypical fragmented-mosaic or jigsaw-puzzle style we would expect from his work, but to an even greater extreme. However, it is without a doubt the most humorous of all the books of his I've read, and is probably one of my top five favorite books of all time, for that reason. People seem to love it or hate it. It either resonates or it doesn't. It speaks to a particular category of other fellow pessimists-bordering-on-misanthropes who appreciate an abrasive style some have labeled the "grumblings of a grumpy old man."
I think the reality is more tragic, however. At age 82, Vonnegut, by his own admission, like Mark Twain and Albert Einstein before him, has given up on humanity, and seems ready to accept both the inevitability of a total global collapse potentially involving the extinction of life on planet Earth as well as the terminable limits of his own mortality. He did indeed die not too long after this book was published, about two years later, in 2007, at the age of 84. I'm not sure if his beloved Pall Malls had anything to do with it.
In other respects, however, it is far from a last gasp, or a final acquiescence of a once-great author, issuing forth one last desperate plea to be heard. To me, this book, unlike his many others, which proffer his messages far more subtly, constitutes a distilled vision of Vonnegut's world view, the pure essence of his psyche. One could easily do a "Who-Said-It-Best" session with Aldo Leopold, in fact: ever read the third part of A Sand County Almanac? The messages are foundationally the same... and they resonate. Both authors are affirmed Luddites, whose writings have a distinct anti-technology vibe, although not quite in a Unibomber-esque sense.
A common theme, in this book, and in the one in which I see the most direct parallel, Aldo Leopold's masterpiece "A Sand County Almanac," at least with respect to Vonnegut's opinions on the environment, is the excessive reliance on automation and mechanization. This is somewhat in keeping with my own views, as I confess that I, too, constitute something of a Luddite. And why not? I've always asserted that automation is anathema to the art of living. As KV states: "We have contraptions like computers that cheat you out of becoming. Bill Gates says, 'wait till you can see what your computer can become.' But it's you who should be doing the becoming, not the damn fool computer. What you can become is the miracle you were born to be through the work that you do." Aldo argued: "mechanization offers no cultural substitute for the split-rail values it destroys." Even his old friend Isaac Asimov echoed something similar in his famous book I, Robot, describing the automatons as a facsimile, "a simulation of life."
One simple way this book really resonated with me personally is that it reminded me how I like to see events when they're presented in narrative form: the description of KV's purchase of a manila envelope from a shop across the street from his apartment in New York City is so vivid that you can project yourself there. For KV to purchase a thousand of them and store them in the closet was unthinkable. It would rob him of the opportunity to experience reality in all its mundane glory. The description of this simple, life-affirming event is exactly that: a connection to something experienced by someone else. There's actual, physical sensation.
I think, in conclusion, the best course is to let KV summarize himself, in the multiplicity of statements and quips found throughout. Below is a selection of those I found most profound, at least through my own eyes. Maybe they will be through yours, too.
-----------------------------------------------
NOTABLE QUOTES... (brace yourself)
"'Socialism" is no more an eveil word than 'Christianity.' Socialism no more presecribed Joseph Stalin and his secret police and shuttered churches than Christianity prescribed the Spanish Inquisition. Christianity and socialism alike, in fact, prescribe a society dedicated to the proposition that all men, women, and children are created equal and shall not starve."
**Thoughts?
"Evolution can go to hell as far as I'm concrened. What a mistake we are. We have mortally wounded this sweet, life-supporting planet-the only one in the whole Milky Way-with a century of transportation whoopee. Our govenrment is conducting a war against drugs, is it? Let them go after petroleum. Talk about a destructive high! You put some of the stuff in your car and you can go a hundred miles an hour, run over the neighbor's dog, and tear the atmosphere to smithereens. Hey, as long as we are stuck with being homo sapiens, why mess around? Let's wreck the whole joint. Anybody got an atomic bomb? Who doesn't have an atomic bomb nowadays?"
** Channeling his inner Aldo here, in short. Anyone who has read A Sand County Almanac will recognize the message: technology is the bane of existence itself... especially the automobile. Gotta get people out of those newfangled contraptions. Aldo writes, in fact: "The retreat of the wilderness under the barrage of motorized tourists is no local thing... Homo sapiens putters no more under his own vine and fig tree; he has poured into his gas tank the stored motivity of countless creatures aspiring through the ages to wiggle their way to pastures new. Ant-like he swarms the continents. This is Outdoor Recreationist, Latest Model."
"Do you realize that all great literature-Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, A Farewell to Arms, The Scarlet Letter, The Red Badge of Courage, The Iliad and the Odyssey, Crime and Punishment, the Bible, and 'The Charge of the Light Brigade' -are all about what a bummer it is to be a human being? (Isn't it such a relief to have somebody say that?)"
**Or, does it say something about the people who consider the aforementioned works to be Great Literature? I'm one of them.
"Critics feel that a person cannot be a serious artist and also have had a technical education, which I had. I know that customarily English departments in universities, without knowing what they're doing, teach dread of the engineering department, the physics department, the chemistry department. And this fear, I think, is carried over into criticism. Most of our critics are products of English departments and are very suspicious of anyone who takes an interest in technology. So, anyway, I was a chemistry major, but I'm always winding up as a teacher in English departments, so I've brought scientific thinking to literature. There's been very little gratitude for this."
**Another nod to Aldo, I think, who talks about something similar. It's curious to me that both are well-educated, but are highly critical of the institutions which produced them, particularly with regard to their method. Aldo notes that "the Ph.D. may become as callous as an undertaker to the mysteries at which he officiates...education, I fear, is learning to see one thing by going blind to another."
"Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college."
**Well, I'm royally F*%@ed, then.
"I am now 82... thanks a lot, you dirty rats. The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick and Colon.... The two most widely abused and addictive and destructive of all substances are both perfectly legal. One, of course, is ethyl alchohol. And President George W. Bush, no less, and by his own admissions, was smashed, or tiddley-poo, or four sheets to the wind a good deal of the time from when he was sixteen until he was forty. When he was forty-one, he says, Jesus appeareed to him and made him knock off the sauce, stop gargling nose paint.
Other drunks have seen pink elephants."
"I am notoriously hooked on cigarettes. I keep hoping the things will kill me. A fire on one end and a fool on the other."
"If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:
THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC."
"Foreigners love us for our jazz. And they dont hate us for our purported liberty and justice for all. They hate us now for our arrogance."
"Shrapnel was invented by an Englishman of the same name. Don't you wish you could have something named after you?"
"Now, during our catastrophically idiotic war in Vietnam, the music kept getting better and better and better. We lost that war, by the way. Order couldn't be restored in Indochina until the people kicked us out. That war only made billionaires out of millionaires. Today's war is making trillionaires out of billionaires. Now I call that progress."
His friend Albert Murray, a jazz historian, says that "blues can't drive deprssion out of a house, but can drive it into the corners of any room where it's being played."
"Our leaders are sick of all the solid information that has been dumped on humanity by research and scholarship and investigative reporting. They think that the whole country is sick of it, and they could be right. It isn't the gold standard that they want to put us back on. They want something even more basic. They want to put us back on the snake-oil standard."
More to the point: "But if you make use of the vast fund of knowledge now available to educated persons, you are going to be lonesome as hell. The guessers outnumber you-and now I must guess-about ten to one."
** He has it half right: I'm not loneesome, sweetie, or lonely either. I'm just alone. They're not the same thing.
"The guessers had had all the power...The guessers had revealed something about themselves, too, which we should duly note today. They aren't really interested in saving lives. What matters to them is being listened to-as, however ignorantly, their guessing goes on and on and on. If there's anything they hate, it's a wise human. So be one anyway. Save our lives and your lives, too. Be honorable."
"A young man in Seattle recently wrote me: 'The other day I was asked to do the now-common act of taking off my shoes at the airport security screening. As I deposited my shoes in the tray, a sense of utter absurdity washed over me. I have to take my shoes off and have them scanned by an X-ray machine because some guy tried to blow up an airliner with his sneakers. And I thought, I feel like I'm in a world not even Kurt Vonnegut could have imagined. So now that I find I can ask you such questions, tell me, could you have imagined it? (We're in real trouble if someone figures out how to make explosive pants.)'
"I wrote back: 'The shoe thing at the airports and Code Orange [soda] and so on are world- class practical jokes, all right. But my all-time favorite is the one the holy, anti-war clown Abbie Hoffman (1936-1989) pulled off during the Vietnam War. he announced that the new high was banana peels taken rectally. So then FBI scientists stuffed banana peels up their asses to find out if this was true or not. Or so we hoped.'"
**I'm gonna leave it at that, 'cause I could never top it.
Well, not really. He even wrote about that dubious prospect, about page 80, that, as a humanist who didn't believe in either divine reward or punishment, "if I should ever die, God forbid, I hope you will say 'Kurt is up in heaven now.' That's my favorite joke." He first lobbed it at an audience at illustrious science fiction writer and fellow humanist Isaac Asimov's memorial service, where he spoke, at one point stating that "Isaac is up in heaven now," which was evidently "the funniest thing I could have said in a roomful of humanists. I rolled them in the aisles. It was several minutes before order could be restored."
I believe it.
Really, how could I review Kurt Vonnegut's work? Easy: I won't. The following short statement on what I would consider to be his second magnum opus will have to suffice. The title is somewhat misleading. It has much less to do with being stateless and far more to do with being in a state of perpetual wonderment (or confusion), a nod to his self-described (dis)organized religious order (Our Lady of Perpetual Astonishment). Herein, one of the greatest writers in American history offers his musings on life, and loss... and, a word of warning: they ain't pretty. They are, however, profound, poignant, and, disturbingly terminal. Understandably, for a variety of reasons, Kurt Vonnegut never could never see the world through rose-colored glasses, at least as an adult. His experiences during the war were just too traumatic, but he channeled that trauma into a body of work that is nothing short of sublime, if painfully cynical.
There's no doubt that Slaughterhouse Five was Vonnegut's literary rendition of Picasso's Guernica, and will always be that one piece that can never be equalled, for the work it accomplished and the generations it has moved, his "glacier book," but A Man Without A Country is just as priceless. I love when I don't gotta guess: according to Vonnegut himself, "this book is about congenitally defective human beings of a sort that is making the whole country and many other parts of the planet go completely haywire nowadays. These were people born without consciences, and suddenly they are taking charge of everything. PPs [AKA psychopathic personalities] are presentable, they know full well the suffering their actions may cause others, but they do not care. They cannot care, because they are nuts. They have a screw loose."
In a series of collected accounts, more vignettes than a collection of essays, as this book is sometimes described, Vonnegut pontificates, hilariously and movingly, about his views on the world and its current state of affairs, especially in the wake of the Bush presidency, in his unique and, here in particular, incisive style. It has the prototypical fragmented-mosaic or jigsaw-puzzle style we would expect from his work, but to an even greater extreme. However, it is without a doubt the most humorous of all the books of his I've read, and is probably one of my top five favorite books of all time, for that reason. People seem to love it or hate it. It either resonates or it doesn't. It speaks to a particular category of other fellow pessimists-bordering-on-misanthropes who appreciate an abrasive style some have labeled the "grumblings of a grumpy old man."
I think the reality is more tragic, however. At age 82, Vonnegut, by his own admission, like Mark Twain and Albert Einstein before him, has given up on humanity, and seems ready to accept both the inevitability of a total global collapse potentially involving the extinction of life on planet Earth as well as the terminable limits of his own mortality. He did indeed die not too long after this book was published, about two years later, in 2007, at the age of 84. I'm not sure if his beloved Pall Malls had anything to do with it.
In other respects, however, it is far from a last gasp, or a final acquiescence of a once-great author, issuing forth one last desperate plea to be heard. To me, this book, unlike his many others, which proffer his messages far more subtly, constitutes a distilled vision of Vonnegut's world view, the pure essence of his psyche. One could easily do a "Who-Said-It-Best" session with Aldo Leopold, in fact: ever read the third part of A Sand County Almanac? The messages are foundationally the same... and they resonate. Both authors are affirmed Luddites, whose writings have a distinct anti-technology vibe, although not quite in a Unibomber-esque sense.
A common theme, in this book, and in the one in which I see the most direct parallel, Aldo Leopold's masterpiece "A Sand County Almanac," at least with respect to Vonnegut's opinions on the environment, is the excessive reliance on automation and mechanization. This is somewhat in keeping with my own views, as I confess that I, too, constitute something of a Luddite. And why not? I've always asserted that automation is anathema to the art of living. As KV states: "We have contraptions like computers that cheat you out of becoming. Bill Gates says, 'wait till you can see what your computer can become.' But it's you who should be doing the becoming, not the damn fool computer. What you can become is the miracle you were born to be through the work that you do." Aldo argued: "mechanization offers no cultural substitute for the split-rail values it destroys." Even his old friend Isaac Asimov echoed something similar in his famous book I, Robot, describing the automatons as a facsimile, "a simulation of life."
One simple way this book really resonated with me personally is that it reminded me how I like to see events when they're presented in narrative form: the description of KV's purchase of a manila envelope from a shop across the street from his apartment in New York City is so vivid that you can project yourself there. For KV to purchase a thousand of them and store them in the closet was unthinkable. It would rob him of the opportunity to experience reality in all its mundane glory. The description of this simple, life-affirming event is exactly that: a connection to something experienced by someone else. There's actual, physical sensation.
I think, in conclusion, the best course is to let KV summarize himself, in the multiplicity of statements and quips found throughout. Below is a selection of those I found most profound, at least through my own eyes. Maybe they will be through yours, too.
-----------------------------------------------
NOTABLE QUOTES... (brace yourself)
"'Socialism" is no more an eveil word than 'Christianity.' Socialism no more presecribed Joseph Stalin and his secret police and shuttered churches than Christianity prescribed the Spanish Inquisition. Christianity and socialism alike, in fact, prescribe a society dedicated to the proposition that all men, women, and children are created equal and shall not starve."
**Thoughts?
"Evolution can go to hell as far as I'm concrened. What a mistake we are. We have mortally wounded this sweet, life-supporting planet-the only one in the whole Milky Way-with a century of transportation whoopee. Our govenrment is conducting a war against drugs, is it? Let them go after petroleum. Talk about a destructive high! You put some of the stuff in your car and you can go a hundred miles an hour, run over the neighbor's dog, and tear the atmosphere to smithereens. Hey, as long as we are stuck with being homo sapiens, why mess around? Let's wreck the whole joint. Anybody got an atomic bomb? Who doesn't have an atomic bomb nowadays?"
** Channeling his inner Aldo here, in short. Anyone who has read A Sand County Almanac will recognize the message: technology is the bane of existence itself... especially the automobile. Gotta get people out of those newfangled contraptions. Aldo writes, in fact: "The retreat of the wilderness under the barrage of motorized tourists is no local thing... Homo sapiens putters no more under his own vine and fig tree; he has poured into his gas tank the stored motivity of countless creatures aspiring through the ages to wiggle their way to pastures new. Ant-like he swarms the continents. This is Outdoor Recreationist, Latest Model."
"Do you realize that all great literature-Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, A Farewell to Arms, The Scarlet Letter, The Red Badge of Courage, The Iliad and the Odyssey, Crime and Punishment, the Bible, and 'The Charge of the Light Brigade' -are all about what a bummer it is to be a human being? (Isn't it such a relief to have somebody say that?)"
**Or, does it say something about the people who consider the aforementioned works to be Great Literature? I'm one of them.
"Critics feel that a person cannot be a serious artist and also have had a technical education, which I had. I know that customarily English departments in universities, without knowing what they're doing, teach dread of the engineering department, the physics department, the chemistry department. And this fear, I think, is carried over into criticism. Most of our critics are products of English departments and are very suspicious of anyone who takes an interest in technology. So, anyway, I was a chemistry major, but I'm always winding up as a teacher in English departments, so I've brought scientific thinking to literature. There's been very little gratitude for this."
**Another nod to Aldo, I think, who talks about something similar. It's curious to me that both are well-educated, but are highly critical of the institutions which produced them, particularly with regard to their method. Aldo notes that "the Ph.D. may become as callous as an undertaker to the mysteries at which he officiates...education, I fear, is learning to see one thing by going blind to another."
"Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college."
**Well, I'm royally F*%@ed, then.
"I am now 82... thanks a lot, you dirty rats. The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick and Colon.... The two most widely abused and addictive and destructive of all substances are both perfectly legal. One, of course, is ethyl alchohol. And President George W. Bush, no less, and by his own admissions, was smashed, or tiddley-poo, or four sheets to the wind a good deal of the time from when he was sixteen until he was forty. When he was forty-one, he says, Jesus appeareed to him and made him knock off the sauce, stop gargling nose paint.
Other drunks have seen pink elephants."
"I am notoriously hooked on cigarettes. I keep hoping the things will kill me. A fire on one end and a fool on the other."
"If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:
THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC."
"Foreigners love us for our jazz. And they dont hate us for our purported liberty and justice for all. They hate us now for our arrogance."
"Shrapnel was invented by an Englishman of the same name. Don't you wish you could have something named after you?"
"Now, during our catastrophically idiotic war in Vietnam, the music kept getting better and better and better. We lost that war, by the way. Order couldn't be restored in Indochina until the people kicked us out. That war only made billionaires out of millionaires. Today's war is making trillionaires out of billionaires. Now I call that progress."
His friend Albert Murray, a jazz historian, says that "blues can't drive deprssion out of a house, but can drive it into the corners of any room where it's being played."
"Our leaders are sick of all the solid information that has been dumped on humanity by research and scholarship and investigative reporting. They think that the whole country is sick of it, and they could be right. It isn't the gold standard that they want to put us back on. They want something even more basic. They want to put us back on the snake-oil standard."
More to the point: "But if you make use of the vast fund of knowledge now available to educated persons, you are going to be lonesome as hell. The guessers outnumber you-and now I must guess-about ten to one."
** He has it half right: I'm not loneesome, sweetie, or lonely either. I'm just alone. They're not the same thing.
"The guessers had had all the power...The guessers had revealed something about themselves, too, which we should duly note today. They aren't really interested in saving lives. What matters to them is being listened to-as, however ignorantly, their guessing goes on and on and on. If there's anything they hate, it's a wise human. So be one anyway. Save our lives and your lives, too. Be honorable."
"A young man in Seattle recently wrote me: 'The other day I was asked to do the now-common act of taking off my shoes at the airport security screening. As I deposited my shoes in the tray, a sense of utter absurdity washed over me. I have to take my shoes off and have them scanned by an X-ray machine because some guy tried to blow up an airliner with his sneakers. And I thought, I feel like I'm in a world not even Kurt Vonnegut could have imagined. So now that I find I can ask you such questions, tell me, could you have imagined it? (We're in real trouble if someone figures out how to make explosive pants.)'
"I wrote back: 'The shoe thing at the airports and Code Orange [soda] and so on are world- class practical jokes, all right. But my all-time favorite is the one the holy, anti-war clown Abbie Hoffman (1936-1989) pulled off during the Vietnam War. he announced that the new high was banana peels taken rectally. So then FBI scientists stuffed banana peels up their asses to find out if this was true or not. Or so we hoped.'"
**I'm gonna leave it at that, 'cause I could never top it.
