Rating: 
Summary: Absolutely indispensible
Review: Catch-22 is one of those rare books that absolutely everyone should read; I reccommend it unceasingly to anyone and everyone. Though it is long, it is very readable, and you'll probably go through it quickly because it's so entertaining. Aside from its sheer fun and humor however, is the true message behind the book. It is often cited as being one of the great ant-war novels - and, indeed, it is just about flawless in this respect - but it goes much deeper than that. Catch-22 is really a book about paradoxes, and the sheer (necessary) insanity of modern life. The title itself is now a common - and oft-heard - refrain in the English language, and many might be unaware of its original source. The dictionary defines "Catch-22" as "a problematic situation for which the only solution is denied by a circumstance inherent in the problem or by a rule" - and that is exactly what the novel presents: situations showing the sheer necessary insanity of modern life. (War is one such - perhaps the most obvious - instance, but there are many others. This book offers satire on other subjects as well - i.e., federal aid for farmers.) And could life as we know it exist without this inherent madness? The question might be a lot more difficult to answer than you think. The premise of this book can also be summed up in a phrase from another great author, Fyodor Dostoevsky, "If everything on earth were rational, nothing would happen." That is what the book tries to say. It is not merely a simple anti-war book, despite what some shallow-headed readers and reviewers might say. I suggest that you read the book with an open mind: it's well worth it. The book is quite hilarous as well - the satire being very sharp-toothed. The book does not have a plot - indeed, it does not even attempt to tell a story, at least not in the usual sense. (Nearly) every chapter is named for a character in the book, and that chapter gradually portrays some of that particular character's crazy antics. Little bits of plot are glimpsed here and there, and then revealed gradually. The book is very non-linear and quite scattershot. It's similar to the way Kurt Vonnegut writes. I reccommend that everyone read this book. Quite aside from its near universal praise and the fact that an everyday word has sprung from it, it was in the Top 10 (#6, I believe) on New Modern Library's Top 100 Books of the 20th century. Put it on your reading list.
Rating:
Summary: Great book!
Review: This book is great! All the characters are insane! I'm almost halfway through and I still haven't found a plot! This book is hilarious, but it is sad and shows how crazy war really is.
Rating:
Summary: Like Drinking Champaign
Review: There are parts in this book that made me laugh out loud. And it made me think. Books don't normally affect me that way. So there is something special about this book. When I finished "Catch-22," I had to tell somebody about the book The urge to talk about it was strong. You always want to talk about grand realizations. Reading this book is one of life's grand realizations. There is no other novel like it in any other country. It is uniquely American. We all know the story. Yossarian's story. We all know about Snowdon. We all know about Milo Minderbinder. And about Major Major. What happens to them at the end of the book? They disappear. They all disappear. That realization made me sit up and take notice. When I was in Vietnam, my closest buddies went home before I did. They all went home at different times in those hot thirteen months. Until I was the only one left in Nam in my unit who remembered the past. Something like that happens in "Catch-22." Yossarian is the only one left at the end of the book. But he also disappears in the last sentence: "He took off." You are probably wondering where I am going with this. It is simply this: People you are close to today disappear tomorrow. Someone always moves, leaves the job, gets divorced, dies, and so on. You look around you and you wonder where did everybody go to? That was what I asked when I finished "Catch-22." "Catch-22" is a fast read. It will leave you full of excitement. It is like drinking champaign: it leaves you feeling very bubbly. I envy the person who is reading it for the very first time.
Rating:
Summary: A Very Funny Catch
Review: Catch-22, it has to be the funniest book I have ever read. The title itself, is a law in the army that has many parts. One of the parts is to get discharged from the army; you have to be crazy. To say you are crazy, you have to ask the doctor to keep you on the ground, but as soon as you say your crazy and want to be grounded, Catch-22 says you are sane to say your crazy so therefore you have to continue flying missions. The book is about a fleet of bombers that are bombing cities in Germany. They are constantly made to bomb, even when they are suppose to be sent home. The whole book is filled with crazy people, like Dunbar, he does things he hates doing, because it would make time go by slowly. Dunbar thought that it would make his life
longer. Orr, has to be one of the weirdest guys out there, like when he talks about putting crabapples in his cheeks when he was little or the prostitute that hit him with a shoe because Orr paid her to do so. The book is mostly composed of learning about characters and then their stories add on to a plot line indirectly. Throughout the book, it reveals more and more of the maincplot, escaping war. I recommend this book to everyone who has a sense of humor and enjoy books about war. I will read this book again, just because it was an all around good book.
Rating: 
Summary: Ha Ha or He He?
Review: Catch-22, it has to be the funniest book I have ever read. The title it self, is a law in the army that has many parts. One of the parts is to get discharged from the army, you have to be crazy. To say you are crazy, you have to ask the the doctor to keep you on the ground, but as soon as you say your crazy and want to be grounded, Catch-22 says you have to be sane to say your crazy so therefore you have to continue. The book is about a fleet of bombers that are bombing cities in Germany. They are constantly made to bomb The whole book was filled with crazy people, like Dunbar, he would do things he hated doing, because it would make time go by slowley. Dunbar thought this would make his life longer. Orr, had to be one of the wierdest guys out there with his stories about putting crabapples in his cheeks or the protitude that hit him with a shoe. The book is mostly composed of learning about characters and then their stories add on to a plot line indirectly. Throughout the book, it reveals more and more of a plot, about escaping war. I recomend this book to everyone who has a sense of humor and enjoy books about war.
Rating:
Summary: clever story
Review: this is one hilarious story with some of the most memorable lines i have ever read in a book! great read!
Rating:
Summary: There's always a catch
Review: Usually I prefer shorter novels, ones in the 200-300 page range. However, at the recommendation of my friend, I decided to give Catch-22 and it's 450+ pages a chance. Looking back, I can't thank my friend enough for this recommendation. Catch-22 follows the people and events surrounding one Captain Yossarian, a World War II bombadier stationed off Italy. All he wants to do is live while, through his eyes, everyone wants to kill him. Even the people on his side are out to kill him. As the number of missions he must fly keeps rising, Yossarian keeps coming up with new ways to avoid his inevitable death. This book is littered with a cournicopia of interesting characters. Each one gets their own chapter (and in some cases, multiple chapters) and Joseph Heller manages to mesh them all together to form an interesting (albeit sometimes hard to follow) plot. At first it seems like the book isn't going to really go anywhere but before you know it, it's there. This book gave me a good chuckle on numerous occassions. Whether it was one of Yossarian's crazy schemes to get sent home or the officers' constant struggle to gain recognition (and promotion), there is never a dull moment.
Rating:
Summary: Yossarian lives!
Review: Heller's style is very similar to Kurt Vonnegut's, and being a huge Vonnegut fan, I really enjoyed Catch-22. The structure of the story was very interesting too - each chapter was about a different character, such that instead of getting a whole story, you get glimpses of the story from many different perspectives, which I think helped develop the characters very well.
The Everyman's Library edition is a very good looking book. And not as bulky as usual hard covers.
Rating:
Summary: Best Book Ever.
Review: The basic story surrounds Captain Yossarian and his experience on the island of Pianosa as a bomber during world war 2, and his attempts to survive. This is really about as much of a plot summary as could be given, though in the end the plot isn't really what this story is about, as it is more of a satire and study of the insanity of the world than it is a story.
I think that this book is brilliant, and that the most interesting part is the unconventional style. Straight narrative attempting to create an at least somewhat realistic situation, while effective for sheer entertainment, isn't typically too exciting to me. I guess it seems to me that if that is what you are attempting to do it would be more effective to make a movie. However, this story is what I believe is called Meta-Fiction, essentially a fictional story, while not fantasy or science fiction, that does not try to seem realistic at all. Thus, the novel has dozens of characters, generally one-sided and completely unbelievable, but they were intended this way so it certainly isn't a technical flaw, though you certainly don't have to like this style. This story is far from linear, up until the very end, with various scenes of significance, particularly the death of Snowden, being slowly revealed overtime. Doing this, I feel, would be essentially impossible to do in a movie, and is thus what makes this so great a work of literature. Perhaps the single thing that will most effect your enjoyment of the book is your views on the humor, which there is not real way to interpret whether or not you will enjoy it. It's focuses on incredible dialogue and finding the insanity in the accepted everyday world, so this book would be more entertaining to the more pessimistic sorts, but this is true of virtually all great literature, particularly modern stuff. Through the humor is where the true themes come through, which I personally believe to frequently have been misinterpreted. Many of you have said that Heller says "Nothing is worth fighting for". Heller might believe this, but this doesn't come out in the Novel. Yossarian doesn't want to fight anymore, but he only tries to get out after he has more than served his country. He does more than anyone does, and more than anyone is expected to. The reason he is kept fighting is to bring glory to his commanding officers, which aren't one and the same with his country. Also, I believe most people put too much emphasis on this taking place during a war. To half steal a quote "To say Catch-22 is a book about war is to say Moby Dick is a book about whales." As I've repeatedly stated, this is about paradoxes and the insanity of modern day life, and this is most readily apparent during wars. Besides the obvious use of the term "Catch-22" there are great many examples not even associated with war. For example, it talks about Major Major's father being paid for not growing alfalfa, and thus making more money and buying more land to not grow more alfalfa and get paid even more, up until he "doesn't grow more alfalfa than anyone else in the state"(or something like that). The irony comes from that doing this was in fact good food the USA, showing that no only is the world insane, but it needs to be in order to function. This sort of thing is the real point of the novel. ...
Rating:
Summary: One of the best books ever written.
Review: It's difficult to write anything meaningfully different about Catch-22 that hasn't already been written. Rather than attempt that, I'll offer my personal experience with this book. I first read it as a teenager, in the mid-1970s. I'd read MASH (Hooker) before reading Catch-22 and was much more impressed with that book (and television series) than I was with Heller's work. Catch-22, I thought, was a part of the same genre: smart-ass anti-war books. It was funny, but bogged down in places and at times simply bored me - the whole bit with Milo Minderbinder, for example. And Major Major was a one-note gag that I quickly dismissed. To be honest, the part of the book that stuck with me throughout the years was Yossarian's having written, "I yearn for you tragically. A.T. Tappman, Chaplain, U.S. Army," and the first two lines of the book. Fast forward to now - 2002: I'm in my early forties and, it is to be hoped, somewhat wiser and more experienced. For no good reason I've decided to re-read the book (I happened upon it in the back of a closet while looking for another book). A few pages in, I couldn't believe how differently I saw the book, the characters and how differently I interpreted Heller's message. After completing the book, I'd discovered that Heller hadn't written an anti-war book, or an anti-Army or anti-government book -- he's written an anti-institution book! The experiences he recorded occur daily in numerous corporations, government bureaucracies, school systems, society -- any setting in which an individual is faced with his anonymity and utter replace-ability in an institution. Major Major, far from being a one-gag joke, is the perfect archetype for the well-meaning mid-level functionary who finds himself powerless to affect change and simply chooses to operate "below the radar," as they say, biding his time and trying to avoid being noticed until he's retired. Milo Minderbinders really do get ahead, and Lieutenant Scheisskopfs really get promoted to the top through no effort of their own! Yossarian was the main character of the book, but the true hero was Orr, who'd figured everything out and used the system to break free. He left tracks for Yossarian to follow, and, we can hope, Yossarian made it past Nately's whore to freedom as well. And, after all these years, I can understand the first two lines of the book. A few random musings: One - Having just seen the series finale to The X-Files, I'm struck by the correctness of fit between the two universes. Two - I bought a paperback edition of this book (Dell) in 1979. It is the same book I just finished re-reading, yellowed and somewhat aged, but otherwise in good condition. Quite a contrast to the novel (Time-Warner) I picked up last month that literally falls apart page by page as I read it.
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