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Summary: Easily one of the most important books of this century
Review: What can one say about "Slaughterhouse 5" that hasn't already been analyzed to death before? Suffice to say, there is a reason this book is seen as a classic: its portrayal of the coldness of war, its time-warping style, Vonnegut's dark humor at an all-time cutting edge... If you have not been forced to read this book in a class, force yourself. If Vonnegut is remembered for one masterpiece, this will be it
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Summary: An Excellently Written Book That Does It's Job
Review: I just finished this book (For the second time) and I can not say enough about it! The total satire that pervaded every idea we cherish in America cannot help but to force you to take a step back and look at us and how we live. His casualness with attrocity, the comparisions between the chaos of World War II and the order of the Tralmafadoran's, the writings of Kilgore Trout... I cannot even begin to describe the complexities and though provoking ideas this book brought out in me! A must have
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Summary: Utterly Fascinatingly Horribly Great!
Review: Never have I read a book that has played upon my conflicting emotions in such a way as this. Do you laugh at Vonnegut's trademark humor--here in top form--or do you cry at the emotionless yet moving retelling of the horrors of war, culminating in the firebombing of Dresden in particular? Neither. This can elicit no singular emotional response, unless sheer awe is an emotion. Utterly fascinatingly horribly great
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Summary: An incredible, unbelievable book!
Review: I read this book as part of my 11th grade English class this year, and had been told for years to read it by my father. I couldn't put it down.
The bitter satire, and the fact that Billy Pilgrim is such an average man made the book more than a good story. The time jumping didn't bother me in the least. Indeed, the whole book read like a true story.
The style, which delivers the most gruesome happenings in a flat, emotionless way, is at the same time full of a criticism of American society and of war. Funny, isn't it, that Billy Pilgrim was happier in Dresden than in America!
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Summary: The Best Of The Best
Review: This is the finest book I have ever read. Humerous and sad in the same moment. It makes a statement about the author's experiences that can be applied to experiences in our own lives. The story is almost a satire with a writing style that cannot be improved upo
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Summary: Great book, very powerful.
Review: For anyone who needs a new outlook on life, this is the book for you. Vonnegut offers the reader a new way of thinking as well as an incredible account of historical fiction. I would recomend it to anyone
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Summary: read this book now
Review: This book is really stellar. It is funny, sad, and thought provoking all the time. The ideas of time it introduces give the entire reader a zen calm and a certain degree of hope, but is not sentimental.
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Summary: An outstanding account of WWII, in a human manor.
Review: Billy Pilgram has come unstuck in time. That is the first line of one of the most powerful anti-war book I have ever read. Vonnegut tells the story of Billy Pilgram, a POW in WWII, based on his own experience as the same. He approches this popular, and sometimes over writen topic with a refreshing, and most human manor. Vonnegut uses emotion rather than plain fact and humor rather than contempt. This book is a must read for anyone interested in the topic of WWII, but not only that, for anyone interested in excellent literature. This edition also includes an essay by Vonnegut himself discribing his own need to write this book and why he choose to write it in the way he has. This book has found it way into my own list of personal favorites, and I'm sure it will become that, or more for you
Rating: 
Summary: An interesting life story of a man with hilarious problems
Review: I greatly admire Vonnegut for his use of transitions from time period to time period.
At first, it was a little awkward, but the storyline became clearer and clearer
as the connections are recognized by the reader.
Rating:
Summary: Read it again
Review: I know this novel fairly well having read it several times (once aloud to my students). It is about all time being always present if only we knew, or could realize it, or had a sense about time in the same way we have senses for light and sound.It is also about the Allied fire bombings of Dresden which killed more people than the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. (And so it goes.) Kurt Vonnegut begins as though writing a memoir and advises us that "All of this happened, more or less..." Of course it did not, and yet, as with all real fiction, it is psychologically true. His protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, an unlikely hero, somewhat in the manner of unlikely heroes to come like Forest Gump and the hero of Jerzy Kosinski's Being There, transcends time and space as he bumbles along. This is a comédie noire--a "black comedy"--not to be confused with "film noir," a cinematic genre in which the bad guys may win or at least they are made sympathetic. In comédie noire the events are horrific but the style is light-hearted. What the genres have in common is a non-heroic protagonist. This is also a totally original work written in a most relaxing style that fuses the elements of science fiction with realism. It is easy to read (which is one of the reasons it can be found on the high school curriculum in our public schools). It is sharply satirical, lampooning not only our moral superiority, our egocentricity, but our limited understanding of time and space. And of course it is an anti-war novel in the tradition of All Quiet on the Western Front and Johnny Got His Gun. Vonnegut's view of time in this novel is like the stratification of an upcropping of rock: time past and time present are there for us to see, but also there is time future. Billy Pilgrim learns from the Tralfamadorians (who kidnapped him in 1967) that we are actually timeless beings who experience what we call the past, present and future again and again. And so Billy goes back to the war and forward to his marriage, and to Tralfamadore again and again. He learns that the Tralfamadorians see the stars not as bright spots of light but as "rarefied, luminous spaghetti" and human beings as "great millepedes with babies' legs at one end and old people's legs at the other." So time is not a river, nor is it a snake with its tail in its mouth. It is omnipresent, yet some things occur before and some after, but always they occur again. And so it goes. What I admire most about this most admirable novel is how easily and naturally Vonnegut controls the narrative and how effortlessly seems its construction. It is almost as if Vonnegut sat down one day and let his thoughts wander, and when he was through, here is this novel. In a sense, Vonnegut invented a new novelistic genre, combining fantasy with realism, touched by fictionalized memoir, penned in a comedic mode as horror is overtaken by a kind of fatalistic yet humorous view of life. Note here the appearance of Kilgore Trout, Vonnegut's alter-ego, the science fiction writer who is said to have invented Tralfamadore. Bottom line: read this without preconceptions and read it without regard to the usual constraints. Just let it flow and accept it for what it is, a juxtaposition of several genres, a tale of fiction, that--as fiction should--transcends time and space.
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