Product Description
The authorized, abridged edition of the 3,000-page, seven-volume magnum opus, which was nominated for the US National Book Critic's Circle Award. The LA Times has said of Vollmann: 'He has an uncompromising intelligence that will change the way you think about all of history.' In this book, a labour of twenty-three years, Vollmann will change the way you think about violence. Vollmann brings to this subject compelling logic, knowledge, research and authentic experience. His research is legendary. He has immersed himself in the hazardous worlds he covers and has put himself in harms way. He has been burned by skinheads, nearly frozen to death on the Arctic tundra, and almost blown to pieces by a mine in Bosnia which killed two of his friends. The history of the world is a history of violence. Vollmann looks at violence through the prism of ethics, and honestly addresses both its value and waste. Rising Up, Rising Down is Vollmann's meditation on the age-old conundrum: when is violence justified?Vollmann writes: 'My own aim in beginning this book was to create a simple and practical moral calculus which would make it clear when it was acceptable to kill, how many could be killed and so forth.' Vollmann has consulted hundreds of sources, scrutinizing the thinking of philosophers, theologians, tyrants, warlords, military strategists, activists and pacifists. He has visited more than a dozen countries and war zones to witness violence firsthand - sometimes barely escaping with his life. The result is a deeply personal book, full of insight, that is a major publishing event, hailed by Zembla magazine as possibly 'the most ambitious literary project ever'. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (14)

Thoughtful
Read it awhile back and can't write anything very useful, but I enjoyed it quite a bit and applaud the effort.

Outstanding Book - Now I'm Looking for the Seven Volume Version
Originally I was going to buy the seven volume version but then I became intimidated by the thought of spending that much time and energy on one book. Then when I discovered the abridged version I quickly bought it - but again became intimidated, not sure why - maybe by the seriousness of the subject matter. This book sat on my "too be read" shelf for a long time.

What took me so long to start?

This is a terrific book and it deals with a subject we all should be thinking about - violence. When is it justified? etc.

Vollman raises some terrific points and his desultory but in depth approach is a joy to read (although the style and format lends easily to skipping about).

After finally reading this book I am now planning on trying to find a couple more used copies to give to friends (because I know that if I give it to anybody they will hold off on starting it just like I did).

Also - I am keeping my eye out for a used copy of the seven volume version (now out of print) which has regrettably become very expensive (it was $75 new - now it is a couple of hundred used!)

It's not as if I'm now going to read the gigantic version cover to cover - but I *would* like to skip around in it. There are several sections that are not in the abridged version that I'd like to read - and the author made sure to put an annotated table of contents of the seven volume version at the end of the abridged version with the goal of tempting people like me to move on to the full version - Mission Accomplished!

Bad communicator
I read this a year ago, and can recall little about it.My point exactly.

I have it listed as - too long and erratic.

Having special ordered this book I forced myself to read it all.
I wasn't impressed with Vollmann and his writing had no effect.

Certainly Posessed of Genius
I have the revised edition (which is availble remaindered at the Barnes and Nobles in my areas for ten bucks), and I can see from the progress I have made in it that it is an extremely important work and might unlock some of Vollman's other work. However, I have some reservations; the abridgement does not seem like it was what Vollman wanted, and some of the cuts leave a disjointed feeling. I have found that I can skip around in the book without losing the meaning, and the arguments do not seem to develop from the first page to the last, but gradually throughout the book. I am reluctant to invest in the seven volume set, but I would like to see an abridgement that is more considered and smooth. Vollman states that he abridged "for money"...when he does it for love of or respect for his readers I think this will be his masterpiece. As is, it is very very good but somehow lack cohesion.

The 7 Volume Set
Vollmann's work is expensive, sprawling, beautiful, and sterilizingly heavy.It's historical analysis, personal anecdote, philosophical inquiry, ethical manifesto, war journalism (his), photography and drawings (mostly his), and thumbnail illustrations.And it's worth the price to get one of the few remaining sets.You'll become intimately acquainted with Trotsky, Cortes, Lincoln, Plato, John Brown, Stalin, Leonidas, Gandhi, the Unabomber, de Sade, Hitler, Montezuma, the Ik, Napoleon, and Mikhail Bakunin, among others.Will you run across an occasional typo or forced metaphor?Sure.But considering the product, who cares?It's brilliant and very, very readable.Two things particularly please me about this work.First, Vollmann never pretends to objectivity.RURD is an "essay" in the original sense of the word, and provokes plenty of discussion.Second, McSweeney's typography and binding are breathtaking, so that each volume is a pleasure to see and hold, much less read.If you enjoy the abridgment, the set is worth all 50,000+ pennies, or whatever the last sets are going for. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (8)

He had a sore throat
As my introduction to the vastness of Vollmann's work, Butterfly Stories: A Novel served me well.
Though seemingly a short story collection, each involving an unnamed protagonist, they all make up the arch of a life lived in pursuit of instinctual desire, mystery, passion and rebellion. The bulk of the book is two stories, one about two men who seek debauchery while on assignment in Thailand and Cambodia, and the second about the journalist's journey to find the woman he met there and is infatuated with.
Vollmann's style is quite dense, his imagination pointedly connected to flashes of impulse, as if his eye has caught something random and his pen infuses that into his previous thought. Maybe stream-of-consciousness is more to it, though there is a distinct feeling, and environment, especially in the central story "More Benadrin, Whined the Journalist."
This is a very sweaty, putrescent, fecal, oozing world. There even were times I was remined of William S. Burroughs and Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers.
I would recommend this for people curious about Vollmann. It is relatively short, for him. On occasion it is graphic and even shocking. But I found it viscerally charged, passinately bold, with a vision of Southeast Asia that delves into it's muck and mire and manages to accomplish a transcendance.

Choose to avert your eyes, or turn them willingly towards disturbing new realities...
William Vollman has to be read, and read more.The question is more which Vollman to read than whether to read Vollman at all.His works can be loosely divided into the historical (the Seven Dreams series and the recent philosophical work in violence, Rising Up and Rising Down) and the journalistic fiction (including Butterfly Stories and Atlas and Whores for Gloria).But the work of cultural archaeology that Vollman is performing can be located in all his works.He is bringing that which has been buried by long years of cultural blindness and prejudice into the light.With great patience we will learn to think "person" when we hear "prostitute", instead of just shaking our heads at what we know only as some abstract category of social depravity - a prejudice that many might protest but secretly be a party to (myself reluctantly included).
In the introduction, honest Vollman makes his plea for suspension of judgment on his blatantly controversial cast of characters:
"In case any of you readers happens to be a member of the Public, that mysterious organization that rules the world through shadow-terrors, I beg you not to pull censorious strings merely because this book, like one or two others of mine, is partly about the most honest form of love called prostitution - a subject which the righteous might think exhausted with a single thought - or, better yet, no thought at all - but the truth is that there are at least thirteen times as many different sorts of whores as there are members of the Public (and I think you know what I mean by members).Shall we pause to admire them all...?"
And from there, Vollman plunges into a heart-wrenching story ofalienation, desparate love-seeking, and reality-smashing encounters with a tumultuous underworld of eager and elusive women.We follow the protagonist, the journalist, from his school days, to a trans-European train ride, to the brothels and discos of Thailand and Cambodia, returning to an estranged home, and the subsequent delirium of desire and uncertainty.
Here is a story about love and loneliness, ethics and humanity, pleasure and pain.It is a story about willful self-destruction and about grabbing for assurances on the way down.It is what you will let it be.Either way, Vollman is a master.

Pretentious and Overwritten
Butterfly Stories is pretentious and overwritten creating a writing style that presents the reader with prose that is obscure for obscurity's sake.This was a most annoying and unfulfilling reading experience.Similar to some of Vollman's other work - this novel is primarily about a man developing unhealthy attachments to prostitutes with Vietnam and the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia as background.Unfortunately the writing style is so overblown it gets in the way of good story telling.

A diificult and well written novel that is not for everyone
'Butterfly Stories' is a unique literary endeavor by one of the most underrated writers of our times, William T Vollman. Many people may have moral issues with this book since the protagonist'and from what I understand, Vollman himself'is an enthusiastic whore chaser. But moral issues aside, one can't ignore the quality of Vollman's prose, the gripping honesty and lyricism of his story, and the fact that his is a novel of ideas.

The story begins with a young boy who calls himself the butterfly boy, living an odd and tormented life in the American suburbs. Sensitive and appreciative of women at a very early age, the butterfly boy is scorned and rejected by his peers. His childhood is characterized on the one hand by the brutal treatment he receives from the school bully, and on the other hand by his remote sense of beauty. One morning the butterfly boy observes a beautiful butterfly whose image remains with him for the rest of his life. It is presumably for this reason that he calls himself the butterfly boy. When he reaches adulthood, each successive phase of the butterfly boy's life is characterized by a new appellation. For example, he becomes the boy who wanted to be a journalist, the journalist, and finally the husband. As the boy who wanted to be a journalist, the narrator travels through Southern Europe with an odd group of people and no prospect of getting laid. As the journalist, he travels with a photographer through Thailand and Cambodia pursuing prostitutes with a sportsman's gusto.

The journalist and the photographer plug their pray with an odd code of bravado that prohibits the use of condoms and practically embraces its suicidal consequences. Shortly before returning to America, the journalist falls in love with a beautiful Cambodian prostitute. Once at home his becomes singularly obsessed with returning to Cambodia and joining her, at which point he refers to himself as the husband. The novel concludes with the would-be lovers reunited but hardly with the cliched happy ending that one might hope for.

Intellectually navigating a novel about prostitution is as tricky as cruising the red light district itself, and Vollman does his best to steer us to the right places in his story. In the preface of the book Vollman acknowledges the stigma of prostitution and challenges the reader not to fall pray to mere public opinion. In other words, if you're going to have issues with this book, don't do so just because it is about [prostitution] and [prostitute] chasing. Fair enough.

One of the central themes of this book is an examination of the nature of power and the will to torment. When he is repeatedly brutalized by the school bully, the butterfly boy considers the possibility that he is something of a problem-solving element in the bully's life. The bully has no sense of self and can only grasp his identity by examining the results of the actions he perpetrates on his subject. The goal isn't so much to hurt the butterfly boy as to study the results of his tormenting actions. He sees himself in the butterfly. Years later, the butterfly boy behaves in an identical fashion during his whore chasing romp through Southeast Asia. As victims of economic and political oppression, the prostitutes have little choice but to have sex with the butterfly boy (now called the journalist). The butterfly boy uses his power over the prostitutes essentially to study and learn about himself. Instead of charging at his subjects in the schoolyard, he is selecting them from the stages of various gogo bars. As a child, the narrator calls himself the butterfly boy. As an adult his life is characterized by promiscuous behavior, which in Southeast Asia normally earns a man the sobriquet of 'butterfly'. In other words, regardless of the various titles the narrator assigns to himself in his adult life, he is still the butterfly boy. This identity is the thread that traverses and essentially explains the entire story. The sensitivities and circumstances that made the child into the butterfly boy have ironically made him into a butterfly in the Asian sense that such a name is assigned.

Although his roles may have altered between childhood and adulthood, the butterfly boy is defined by the same psychological mechanism. Having been the victim of the school bully, he has become something of an economic and sexual bully himself (After all whore chasers really are just amateur rapists.). He can now see things from the bully's perspective and he can use other people to examine his own life. Vollman is telling us that if we're going to judge this book we have to get past the mere stigma of prostitution. The truly frightening and interesting part of this book is the psychological mechanism that forms and propels the butterfly boy. But to understand this, we have to accept him and accompany him on his torrid journey.

After reading the preceding paragraph, one might begin to think that the butterfly boy is an awful human being. After all, how could he after so much bullying and tormenting in turn pray upon destitute young girls in Southeast Asia? But moral judgments are never so simple, as Vollman goes to great lengths to tell us. The narrator of these stories is not without his sensitivities. When recounting his childhood misery, he draws a timeline between those events and the genocide in Cambodia. His own horrors are vastly overshadowed by those of the Cambodian people he will later meet and they are also forming the circumstances that will draw them together. Despite the fact that he is exploiting people in other countries, the butterfly never has any illusions about his own repugnant quality or about the fact that these are real human beings, not mere props for his amusement. His attitude is less offensive than seemingly more egalitarian individuals who view citizens of foreign countries as mere components of their new cultural experiences. It would be easy for Vollman to sensationalize his subject matter as a less skilled writer would surely do. But Vollman writes with lucid, mature prose that reads like an ironic documentary of sorts. Occasionally, he teases the reader with philosophical musings to remind us how smart he is. At one point, when the butterfly boy meets a man whose entire family was massacred by the Khmer Rouge he asks, 'if this man's suffering is greater than mine, does this mean that he is greater than I am?' 'Butterfly Stories' is challenging to say the least and is well worth the read. Regardless of your perspective be it moralist, intellectual, or a reader of smut, you will not find this book entirely comfortable.

If you are looking for a fun and easy read then skip this book. If you are interested in well written prose and a novel of ideas than you may find it worth accompanying Vollman to the dingy hotels in the red light districts of Bangkok and Pnom Pen.

Absolutely Horrible
This book is a sordid collection of junk.I picked it out at random from a library shelf and did not enjoy/like/sympathize with even one thing about it.Don't waste your time. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

How one of those humanities guys looks at science
Probably how he looks at all us technology guys too!

Technology guys need to get past our thin skins and ignore the well-written, deep-disguised digs, ostensibly (and literally) aimed at all sorts of scientists back in the days of Copernicus, to include belittling the Man himself from time to time.Vollmann is an excellent writer, and brings to the world of 16th century astronomy more than just a colorfully descriptive style, but also a profound compliment for what science does through the ages.He's a fiction writer "normally," and uses color effectively -- otherwise, he couldn't sell much fiction!Think about how matter-of-fact so much of what is published in science fields today, and wonder how much more interesting they might be if a fiction writer took a turn at nonfiction as Vollmann did!

True, there are much better texts on any of the science topics treated in "Uncentering the Earth."True also, the author probably did deep research on those specific pieces of science about which he wrote, sometimes in considerable detail; and these spots of good reporting sometimes seem poorly connected with each other.Still, the reader might be delighted that a fiction writer could actually pull this off.Nevertheless, if the readers seek a detailed account of Copernicus and his work, or of the advances of science in the 16th century, or of which persons passed along what bits of knowledge at that time, then this book will probably not do.Understandably so.If instead one would like a fresh (and sometimes slightly insulting) way to look at this particular famous person of Copernicus for perspective, then "Uncentering" might be just the distraction.

It can be frustrating in this work, though, to pin down specifically why the author admires Nicolaus Copernicus.Although he speaks those words a couple times through the book, the reasons are fuzzy and somewhat unconnected with the text around it (see if you can find them!)This reviewer personally concludes that Mr. Vollmann believes that Copernicus changed astronomy (and hence science?) into a predictive way of thinking, rather than a reactive way.That's would be an excellent compliment indeed.

The Universe Screams


I completely understand the negative reviews this book has received.But I would like to defend this book, which I believe is worth the time and effort.

This is a disappointing book if you are reading it for the wrong reason.The wrong reason is if you are reading this book as an astronomy buff who wants to learn more about Copernicus.Again, that is a very understandable mistake to make.By all appearances, it looks to be a serious academic discussion of the work of Copernicus and its role in the scientific paradigm shift.

The right reason to read this book is not as an astronomy buff but as a William T. Vollman buff. I can't get enough of Vollman's writing.And he can't seem to stop writing so it's a good match (this is a writer, for example, who has completed an over 3,000 page essay on the nature of violence).Vollman has the gift of being able to encompass the full depth of the human experience in every sentence he writes.When he writes of ecstatic happiness, he manages to imbed it with hints of cruelty and suffering.When he writes about tragedy and death, there are twisted traces of sweetness and cathartic joy.

I'm a fan of the history of science and good science writing too.And while this book might not be the most straightforward way to learn about Copernicus, there is factual information here about Copernicus' "On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres."We are also given Vollman's meditations on the nature of scientific revolutions and the way science as a process will always be hampered by human imperfection, by our individual investments in our beliefs, and by the stubborn drag of institutional momentum."'Revolutions' was profoundly dangerous in its epoch, and hence profoundly necessary."

Why would Vollman take on this task?He tells us this book is the result of an "exercise in explicating a subject slightly beyond my intellectual competence."But, when he marvels at the effort, "the immensity of the force required" and the "solitary years" behind Copernicus' work, we get a sense of the parallel process driving Vollman's own desires to nudge the universe.

Very Disappointing
I bought this book with high hopes of finding an interesting and illuminating look at how Copernicus revolutionized astronomy. I was so disappointed that I did something I virtually never do: after about 90 pages, I put the book away with no intention of finishing it. Vollmann is a writer of note, but in this case his writing is so mannered and his exposition seemingly so convoluted that the reader quickly grows fatigued. At least, this reader did.

Snoozefest
This is the most uninteresting book on science or a scientific personality that I have read in recent times. I was looking forward to reading about the middle ages, the environment in which Copernicus grew up, the scientific world view at the time, the social mileu, what Copernicus himself was like, what his religious beliefs were, how he arrived at his conclusions, and what his book meant in terms of courage and conviction in that time. And, of course, a lot of actual science.

Instead we get such hard to read, boring, insipid prose dissecting the text of his work that it's a real effort to turn each page. I felt like giving up at every turn till I was half-way through but only sheer will and expectation that it would get better kept me going. But I gave up at the half-way mark.

I had learned very little that stayed with me and I had hardly enjoyed it. For those interested, Bill Bryson's "A short history of nearly everything" is one that succeeds quite well at this attempt to dispense science to the laymen.

save your money and time
If you are interested in what Copernicus did, save your money and time and don't buy this book.Instead, get ahold of Thomas Kuhn's masterful account "The Copernican Revolution".

This book is one of a series in which non-scientists present popular accounts of mostly great episodes in science.I say mostly great because there seems to be a certain amount of political correctness in the choice of scientists to write about in the series.But I digress.

Some of the books in this series are successful, for example the one by Madison Smartt Bell on Priestley, Lavoisier, and the chemical revolution.But when you have fiction writers expounding technical subjects, there is potential for trouble, and that is what we get with Vollmann's book on Copernicus.

Vollmann's explanations of the technical aspects of Copernicus' work are superficial and hard to grasp.Kuhn is much better.Vollmann also has a complusion to say snotty things about everyone involved, about their thoughts, motives, habits of mind.One would think that the ancients who constructed early science and astronomy were a bunch of idiots who had to wait for Copernicus to come along, who of course was a dolt because he was "obedient" to Aristotle for the most part, and was incapable of writing clearly to boot.Kuhn is incomparably better at explaining the philsophical, religious, scientific, and historical contexts in which the ancients, Copernicus, and the other early moderns worked.For example, you get a real sense of why the ancient earth-centered system was the reasonable system, that the ancient heliocentric precursors of Copernicus didn't have much in the way of evidence or reason on their side.You get a sense from Kuhn of just what it was that made the heliocentric theory attractive to Copernicus -- the changing context of observational astronomy, and above all the clarity which the heliocentric view gave to the matter of the oddities of the motion of certain of the planets.

If you really want a sense of the greatness of ancient scientific thought, of ancient astronomy, of the magnificence of the accomplishment of Copernicus and his followers in the modern scientific revolution, get ahold of Kuhn's book. ... Read more

Product Description
MCSweeny's quarterly publication. This edition is held by cardboard boards with blue cloth covered spine, disbound syle contains eight individual soft covers by the various authors. ... Read more

Product Description
BOMB 27, Spring 1989, featuring: Interviews with Terry Kinney by Craig Gholson, Robert Greene by Klaus Kertess, Salman Rushdie by Ameena Meer, Alexander Kluge by Gary Indiana, Polly Apfelbaum, Bill Barrette, Nancy Shaver by Stephen Westfall, Penny Arcade by Allen Frame, Dennis Cooper by Tim Guest, James Nares by Betsy Sussler, Michael Tetherow by Ellen Phelan, Abbijane by Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Carmello Pomodoro by Elizabeth Cannon. Essays on Marseilles by Elenor Trifon, and Mats Gustavson by David Seidner. Fiction & Poetry Dennis Potter, Lorena Cassady, William T. Vollmann, Michael O'Brien, Paul Schmidt, Cheri Fein Artworks by Joseph Nechvatal, Steven Keister, Olivier Richon, John Armleder, Kenny Scharf, R.M. Fischer, William Wiley, Dona Nelson, and Jean Michel Basquiat. ... Read more