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With a career spanning 50 years, Kurt Vonnegut is one of the most prolific and popular American writers of the 20th century. Though his works have often met with mixed reviews, and have been difficult to categorize, his status of cultural icon and one of the most important contemporary novelists is well established. This critical companion, perfect for students, skillfully guides readers through seven of Vonnegut's most important novels including Player Piano (1952), Mother Night (1961), Cat's Cradle (1963), and Slaughterhouse Five (1969). A full chapter is devoted to each work, with clear analysis of plot, character development, thematic concerns, symbolism, and a close critical reading. A chapter on the life of Kurt Vonnegut gives an up-to-date biography, with interesting details relating the facts of his life to his writings. The Literary Contexts section, devoted to examining issues of genre, influences, and themes in Vonnegut's writing, adds to a fuller understanding of the man and his literary works. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

I love you have you seen where my damn car keys got to?
I just finished the book. Oh dear. Oh migod. Hoo boy, this is going to be tricky and a lot of people are not going to believe it.

Author Loree Rackstraw has written a wonderfully honest, loving, detailed and dignified history of her special relationship with Kurt Vonnegut that began in 1965. In doing so she has kept a promise and brilliantly discharged an obligation to her dearest friend, may he rest in peace. It might be best to leave matters there but, without intending to do so and without her realizing it, Loree Rackstraw has also crafted a 264 page Psychological Report upon one of the most beloved figures in 20th century American literature. We stand to learn 1) things we did not suspect, and 2) things whose import to the fruit of his mind and hands is difficult if not impossible to validate. To repeat, oh dear.

Although Loree Rackstraw and John Irving knew the same individual across the same time span, they did not know the same "people". That is because the bottom line of the Psychological Report is that Kurt Vonnegut Jr. - from puberty onward - most likely belonged to that small fraction of humanity in whom forces of trauma or stress devolved multiple personalities. If one already has "MPD" and ends up in a world war being bombed by friendly fire in a Dresden slaughterhouse, how does this affect the absorbing of the experience into a Mind that needs to remain sane? Maternal figures frequently lie at the root of MPD development. Suppose that female figure commits suicide? Do you hear the can opener? Should debate about this case ensue, this writer believes that the best judges are not lettered mental health professionals but individuals whose daily life involves coping with dissociative experience. Of importance is to emphasize that the verity of this psychological possibility would not in any way denigrate Kurt Vonnegut or his "memory". It could well "explain him" to his own children.

The obvious first challenge is to the credentials of this writer to interpret Love As Always, Kurt as a psychological report. This is not the venue for such a challenge, but as someone the same age as John Irving who has retired after a long career in clinical psychology (in Toronto) I can dot scientific eyes and cross clinical tees with the best of them. I wrote psychological reports and did therapy for a living.I read Slaughterhouse Five, Galapagos, and A Prayer For Own Meany the week they each hit bookstores.

Thank you, Loree Rackstraw for being the mother and sister and special friend that Kurt Vonnegut needed, any hour of the day or night.

... Read more

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Kurt Vonnegut sees the future in his 1963 novel Cat's Cradle, and not only is it scarier than we might imagine, it is comically much, much crazier. In brief, pungent chapters, he describes a world racing toward apocalypse, courtesy of a deadly discovery made by a brilliant scientist—a matter called "ice-nine"—that becomes the secret weapon of his three incredibly dysfunctional adult children. Along the way, the reader becomes acquainted with an outlawed religion called Bokononism, a Caribbean banana ... Read more

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In this elegantly produced, extended conversation celebrating the writing craft, Kurt Vonnegut and acclaimed Grand Central Winter author Lee Stringer explore what it means to be a writer -- and what it means to be human.

Vonnegut and Stringer are passionate about one another's work,passionate about life, and passionate about writing, but not so muchso that they ever, for a moment, lose their sense of irony orhumor. In the age of the sound bite, literature can be deemed, on somelevel, useless. Stringer praises writing, in that context, as "astruggle to preserve our right to be not so practical." And Vonnegut? "We are here on Earth to fart around," he proclaims inTimequake (excerpted here). "Don't let anybody tell you anydifferent!" --Jane Steinberg ... Read more

Customer Reviews (9)

Waste of money, not of time.
_Like Shaking Hands With God_ is not worth the money of you have read the other works by Vonnegut he wrote since 1980 that spells out his personal philosophy on life, the universe and everything. However, I stand by my assertion that if someone were to publish Vonnegut's collected grocery lists, I would buy that book.

This book, comes close. It is short and spare and lacking in depth -- 80 pages of widely spaced larger type font. I am now vaguely interested in the writings of Lee Stringer now, but not enough that I plan on following up on finding more
about his work.

Slight, but wise
The transcript of two conversations between writers Kurt Vonnegut and Lee Stringer. Helpful to those who are considering writing or those who are required to study writing. What is offered? Some wisdom, a few prods, some encouragement--and the imperative: write nothing insincere.

Short, yet inspiring
I was able to finish this short book in a few hours at my job. When I was in high school first looking for colleges to attend, the only thing I was certain of was that I wanted to write. Of course life managed to get in the way of that dream, however, after reading this 80 page conversation I feel more inspired to pick up where I left my dream. I was expecting more out of the conversation, but hearing these two incredible authors speak back and forth makes you want to read more and more of their material. I suppose I find it nice to see a personally attached to writers. I would completely recommend this book to anyone who reads their work, and has an hour or two extra.

The art of Being

This is a wisp of a book. At less than 80 pages, I read it in one evening in the time it took me to eat a few tapas and down two pints of beer. By the time the check arrived, I was already writing down my thoughts inside the back cover.

But what an enjoyable wisp it is!

Almost everyone I know is a fan of Kurt Vonnegut, and so the colorful and curmudgeonly wisdom he brings to the table here is no surprise. But who is this Lee Stringer guy? By the end, I began to think of him as a superior version of James Frey (author of the badly written pseudo memoir "A Million Little Pieces") with the main difference that Mr. Stringer (1) writes well and (2) his tales about life on Skid Row are true. Actually, now that I think of it, that's kind of like saying I'm like Shakespeare except that he (1) writes a lot better and (2) he's been dead for almost 400 years.

Anyway, back to the book: I admit that Like Shaking Hands With God doesn't offer a great price-per-word ratio (it's slim and relatively expensive) but it does offer a great deal of wisdom on its handful of pages. Based on two conversations between two friends with a lot of respect for each other, these guys are smart, they know how to express themselves, and they've been around the block a few times.

The book bills itself as "a conversation about writing" and it is that. But it's more of a conversation about being, but a kind of being that involves writing. For a lot of avid readers, that's a perfect fit.

A great little book
I liked the conversational tone of it- and it really is a very enjoyable short and easy read.The second part of the book isn't as good as the first.If you like Vonnegut, you'll dig this.Lots of ideas to chew on. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

A masterful writer in mid-career
There is value in reading or re-reading apparently dated analytical works. What value in navigating an antiquated literary critique? This: freshness. Those who view a phenomenon first-hand have a different take on events than we who peer from a distance. The authors collected in THE VONNEGUT STATEMENT were looking at a writer at a mid-career apogee. Kurt Vonnegut had recently released SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE (Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence, 1969), his (to that point, at least) masterwork, and was soon to release BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS (Delacorte Press, 1973). Hot stuff.With the 1996 production of the film MOTHER NIGHT ("We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be."), Vonnegut re-entered pop culture (versus literary culture), a connection dormant since the film version of SLAUGHTERHOUSE in the 70s. Vonnegut's goal inthat novel was a timeless, spaceless vision, "an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep."The analysis in THE VONNEGUT STATEMENT follows Vonnegut's development of a style and a voice capable of handling the horror of Dresden, the Allied firebombing which destroyed both a city and his own world view. In so doing he moved the Novel out of linear storytelling and into a new form, modelled, as he says, on the novels of Tralfamadore, whose alien citizens know that everything is and was and will be as it must -- "beautiful and surprising and deep." With Vonnegut's death this year, I suspect many will want to pick up THE VONNEGUT STATEMENT once again.

The Vonnegut Statement
With the great popular and critical success of Slaughterhouse Five, Cat's Cradle, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater and his earlier novels, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. has emerged as a major American writer. He has also written plays, films, stories, essays, and personal journalism for McCall's, Colliers, The Saturday Evening Post, Cosmopolitan and other popular magazines, all of which are studied here for their contribution to Vonnegut's world.

The Vonnegut Statement confronts the difficult task of explaining a living and productive writer: how his works came into being, why they became popular, and what may be the clues to their artistic success. Fourteen authorities on different aspects of the writer's career have pooled their efforts to produce a complete and coherent picture of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. as a public figure and as a literary figure, concluding with an assessment of his work. Vonnegut's popular acceptance as a paperback writer, as a nationally prominent personality, and as a hero of college youth is studied with his own development through college and popular magazine writing to his current status as one of the significant novelists of our time.

Jerrome Klinkowitz has researched the facts of Vonnegut's publication and popularity. Dan Wakefield has written a personal essay from the view offellow-writer and friend. The critic Robert Scholes deals with Vonnegut's early writing as an undergraduate, and also conducts an interview with the author. John Somer, with several other contributors, sums up the achievement of Vonnegut's literary art. The Vonnegut Statement begins with a consideration of Kurt Vonnegut himself, the artistic canary in a cathouse; and it concludes with a study of his cry, on the last page of his most recent novel - "Poo-tee-weet?"
--- from book's dustjacket ... Read more

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This book is the first scholarly study to discuss all of Vonnegut's novels against the background of his other writing, events of the 20th century, and the vast array of Vonnegut scholarship. In his novels he speaks eloquently and succinctly for his generation of Americans--the central generation of 20th-century Americans--thus making him the representative 20th-century American writer. Morse discusses how Vennegut's novels reflect the major traumatic public and private events that have gone into imagining being an American during that century, including the Great Depression, World War II, the Bomb, Vietnam, the weakening of social institutions, the vicissitudes of marriage and family, divorce, growing old, experiencing loss, and anticipating death. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Imagining Reading a Book
Academic literary criticism is a worthwhile endeavor, at least in some environments, but you have to wonder for whom these practitioners are really writing, and for what purpose. This review may give the impression that I think all literary criticism is useless, but that's not the case. I read this work by Morse voluntarily in the course of research on Kurt Vonnegut. However, this particular book illustrates the absolute worst tendencies of the field. Granted, Morse was able to uncover some of the common thematic threads in Vonnegut's various novels, and that's useful to the literature student. But otherwise we have an annoyingly obtuse and turgid presentation of doubtful utility to anyone other than a few professors. On the surface, while it appears that Morse is arguing his own position on Vonnegut's greatness, this is only accomplished through a rather laughable obsession with the phrase "imagining being an American" (based on a Vonnegut line), which Morse uses less for analysis and more as an opportunity for shameless academic namedropping and attempts at wispy postmodern connections. You know the type - Vonnegut book A worked with theme B which can be compared to Greek tragedy C and both were influential in literary style D while making the groundbreaking point E.

Meanwhile, Morse's insufferable prose is stuffed full of quotes and references from everyone who has ever said anything about Vonnegut (academically, that is), obsessive and forced comparisons to Mark Twain and Ralph Waldo Emerson (and a few others), and the standard critic's amazement at how a writer made use of experiences and opinions from his own life. Here's an example of both the uselessly turgid and the pathetically obvious: "Vonnegut's dominant themes derive from his having experienced the major public and private traumatic events characteristic of twentieth-century Americans." Golly! But read carefully (if you can stay awake) and you'll see that while Morse slowly analyzes various Vonnegut novels, this dense slab of obtuse professor-speak never gets beyond basic concepts, which any reader of the novels could figure out just by paying attention. And the greatest irony here is that Vonnegut himself would be heavily unimpressed by the scholastic over- (or under-)interpretation of his novels by academics like Morse and his colleagues. Vonnegut, along with most professional authors, wishes to advance thought-provoking themes and opinions with millions of potential readers. Morse, and academic literary critics in general, write to impress a few other professors with incomprehensible theory and gratuitous namedropping. That's how to completely miss the point of great literature - the joy of reading. [~doomsdayer520~]

Imagine
I have known Prof. Donald Morse since my first year as a student at Oakland University in 1968.We still communicate regularly some 37 years later.My view of his work is not unbiased. He is a remarkable scholar. In "Imagining Being an American", Prof. Morse brings his literary focus to the works of Kurt Vonnegut.He shows us the evolution of Vonnegut's ideology, and art, and casts him persuasively in the mold of the great satirists of the past as well as promoting him as the truly original American novelist of the last half of the 20th century.

Prof. Morse chronicles Vonnegut's works individually and in their relationship to each other, and demonstrates how the influences and events of Vonnegut's personal, political, and professional life are brought to a creative dialogue in both the characterizations he employs and the stories he develops.But to understand art is more than means and mechanics, it is the ability to reach into each of us and communicate what we have in common and in connection. That which lifts art above craft is its ability to challenge us to be, wisely, and it is here most effectively that Prof. Morse demonstrates Vonnegut's great gift and uniquely American voice.

Prof. Morse's critique exams the humor, pathos, and tragedy that drives Vonnegut's work.It is not for the squeamish who are afraid to confront the idea of a view of life that strips away the pretense of magic, jingoism, ritual, luck, and even god before it comes to the conclusion that all we have here is each other and if we are to be well, we must first learn to treat each other well.

If you wish to truly expand your appreciation of Vonnegut, start here.
... Read more

Product Description
Kurt Vonnegut's career as a novelist encompasses virtually the whole second half of the twentieth century, and his novels are among the most widely read in America. Yet Vonnegut enjoyed another successful career as a short story writer. His short fiction brought him much acclaim in the early years of his writing career and made him visible to a very large audience. His stories were illustrated by some of the best artists in the business and were featured prominently in leading magazines such as Collier's, the Saturday Evening Post, Ladies Home Journal, Cosmopolitan, and Argosy. By examining Vonnegut's short fiction, this study illuminates his development as an author and contributes to a better understanding of the entire canon of his works. ... Read more

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Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. himself reads from his most celebrated works: Breakfast of Champions, Cat's Cradle, Slaughterhouse-Five, and three complete stories from Welcome to the Monkey House. "A satirist, a keen observer of the follies of mankind and of the hypocrisies of its leaders"
-Isaac Asimov ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Wonderful
My husband is legally blind and a great Vonnegut fan.This product is wonderful for him.

A must have for Vonnegut fans
I loved these books, except for the fact that they are abridged.The main thing I liked was that Vonnegut plays and sings the songs which he writes in the books.Whenever a song appears in a Vonnegut text, you have lyrics, but no melody.I expected to only hear him read the lyrics, but he has an acoustic guitar and SINGS.That was a trip.

<br>LISTEN TO VONNEGUT
There's nothing like listening to an author read from his work.This audio collection - Vonnegut reading from Slaughterhouse Five, Welcome to the Monkey House, Breakfast of Champions, and Cat's Cradle - is an absolutemust for any fans of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Slaughterhouse-Five is one of the best books ever written!
This audio-cassette version of Slaughterhouse-Five is a great way to enjoy Vonnegut at his best.Follow Billy Pilgrim through a hillarious and moving journey through life that has more relevence to real life than any other character in modern American fiction.Vonnegut's influence is wide and well respected mostly due to Slaughterhouse-Five.A must buy ... Read more

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2_B_R_0_2_B

By
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Got a problem? Just pick up the phone.
It solved them all--and all the same way!

A forgotton short story classic ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Free SF Reader
One in, one out. Three at a time sometimes handy.


3.5 out of 5 ... Read more