Rating: 
Summary: Very excellent..
Review: I will not sit here for an hour and give you every detail of the book. No, infact I will say that this book is well writen, has a wonderful charm and is filled with such a funny story line. Nothing you will be laughing aloud to. Please read and enjoy.
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Summary: Vonnegut's "Lousy Little Book" is a Masterwork...Period.
Review: I wish I could tell what a masterpiece this book is. I would tell you of Vonnegut's simple, but masterful use of language and the book's utterly honest humanity and screaming rage against mass death and destruction will leave any reader who undertakes this book profoundly moved and perhaps even changed.There are other reviews here that state it far more eloquently than I have. All I can say is that if you have not read this book, I strongly urge you to do so right away. If you have read it, well then you know how brilliant it already is. This immortal work will make Vonnegut's name forever large in the pantheon of great writers.
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Summary: Everything you need to know about life is in SH-5
Review: Slaughterhouse Five is my all-time favorite book. The first time I read it, I was an undergraduate at Colorado State University and since that time, I've made it a point to re-read it every year hence. It's like those Airplane movies from eighties: everytime I read it I see something new. Vonnegut successfully weaves the comic with the tragic and makes a sobering case for determinism. The Tralfamadorians have a little saying..."there are three things you can't change, the past, the present and the future." The book is constantly catching the reader off-guard, for one minute he might describe the suffering of an American POW in WWII, and then take the time to illustrate that Billy Pilgrim, "had a tremendous wang. You never know who'll get them." Many have refered to it as an anti-war book, but I think it, much like Dr. Strangelove, illustarates the absurdity of war and further, the absurdity of life in general. At times it comes dangerously close to being nihilistic, with it's moral relativism, but it's too damn funny to be considered a truly existential work. Anyway, the book speaks to me, and I recommend it to anyone I meet who wants to understand me better. 5-Stars
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Summary: Vonnegut is no Nazi apologist...
Review: "Slaughterhouse-Five" is brilliant because Kurt Vonnegut is NOBODY'S apologist. You may disagree with his politics (and I definitely do), but his story of Billy Pilgrim, a hapless World War II veteran who lives in several parallel timelines, is a masterwork. Vonnegut was actually there. He was a POW in Dresden when it was bombed into the stone age. He witnessed its effects first-hand. He even wrote himself into "Slaughterhouse-Five" as a background character. Personally, I think story-behind-the-story is that Pilgrim is the author, or a part of him that splintered off. Billy Pilgrim's was a fragile mind that came unhinged because he saw too much. His leaps of fancy, which are written as though real, are the product of a mind stressed beyond its breaking point. Kurt Vonnegut, unlike Pilgrim, did not suffer a break with reality. Instead he chose to part with it on his own terms - as a novelist. I would imagine that there are only so many civilian corpses - woman and children chief among them - you can stack on bonfires before you start to question your own sanity - and the sanity of the people responsible. What he offers in "Slaughterhouse-Five" (and in every novel of his I've read) is not a condemnation of a particular group (i.e., Americans) but of the human race as a whole. Necessity does not make atrocities any less horrific. Killing is killing. Though it may be justified in some sense (in the case of self-defense, or the defense of others), it is no less an act of destruction. Morally speaking, war punishes the victor, too. Vonnegut's argument, as I read it, is that we need to stop thinking of any war as justified or necessary. War is neither. It is simply a fact of human nature that aggressors will attack others, and that we must sometimes act to stop them. That we shouldn't have to in the first place is, I think, the whole point of the book. It's insanity to incinerate people by the thousands. That the axis forces did it first makes it no less so. That it may have been necessary in some way only shifts the blame. No one who commits such acts - even for the greater good - has a clean conscience, except people who are clinically insane. In short, there is a distinction to be made between the morality of going to war, and the morality of war itself. I think Kurt Vonnegut sees this. If you don't, then it's all the more reason to read this book.
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Summary: Slaughterhouse Five and Revisionist Vonnegut
Review: Up until the time I went away to college, I read everything that Kurt Vonnegut ever wrote, including tracking down his out-of-print short stories, and thought he was brilliant. Of course, Slaughterhouse Five was Vonnegut's pinnacle, and I remember seeing the movie when it first came out, so I guess that dates my age. However, at some point I began hearing about German-Americans who (before my time) opposed the US involvement in WWII, and supported, or at least were apologists for, Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany. I wonder now, in my more mature years, whether Vonnegut isn't in effect an apologist for Nazi Germany, and therefore whether our opinions about Vonnegut's legacy should be revised. One has to ask what are Vonnegut's messages? There is certainly an anti-war message, which was popular during the era of the US involvement in Vietnam, contemporaneous with the publication of Slaughterhouse-Five, although Vietnamese-Americans familiar with the acts of Khmer Rouge may have felt differently. But does this mean that Vonnegut thinks the US shouldn't have gotten involved in WWII? There is also what I would call a moral relativism message, which argues that the US was also guilty of atrocities during WWII, i.e. the bombing of Dresden and the use of the atomic bomb against Japan, so by implication the US was just as blameworthy as the Axis. For me, though, this borders on a deliberate obscuring of the more basic moralities of WWII, and thus at least semi-consciously attempts to minimize the evils of the Nazis. Granted, there were many instances where the Allies could have conducted the war in other, arguably better, ways, but it should be remembered that it was Axis aggression that led to WWII, which in turn led to the deaths of 56 million people, not to mention the wholesale slaughter of 6 million innocent Jews in the gas chambers. Of course, Vonnegut would recognize that the Germans were first in conducting an air war against an innocent civilian population of London in the Battle of Britain, but that essentially two wrongs don't make a right. Vonnegut's argument seems to me to be a lot like blaming your parents for all the little mistakes they made in raising you, while basically your parents loved you, were good people, and did the best they could for you, even though they weren't perfect. Then there is a similar morally relativistic message that you would have done the same thing as the Germans, under those circumstances, if you were in their place, which is really the same defense the Germans made at Nuremberg, and which Vonnegut seems to accept as a valid, or at least understandable (Mother Night). He blurs the line between philosophical determinism and the Nuremberg defense, and thus excuses moral responsibility. His characters tend to commit suicide instead of making moral choices. The science fictional device -- getting unstuck in time -- prevents the reader from thinking things through too deeply, in favor of an absurdist reality that is palatable to the lowest common denominator. Vonnegut would have us look at WWII through the eyes of suffering Germans, implying they should all be seen as equally innocent, too. Finally, there is a sort of existentialism behind everything, characterized by "So it goes" and "And so on." Vonnegut implies it's all just history marching on in its hideous way, and there's nothing we can do about it. But Vonnegut's "So it goes" is willing to suspend all judgments and excuse everything, whereas there is such as thing as existential ethics. I guess it's more attractive to forgive and forget and have a good time, as I felt as a youngster in the Seventies first reading Vonnegut, but what do I feel now? One of the problems about Vonnegut, a bit of an insidious thing in my opinion, is that his books are written for teenagers. Basically, most teenagers are not yet in a very good position to have a moral sense, which comes from experience or a kind of wisdom a lot of us didn't have at that age. Nor can Vonnegut be accused of having a complex prose style, as one of his trademarks, which makes his novels so appealing to such a wide range of people, is that he writes without any complicated vocabulary or sentence structure. I remember Vonnegut being very influential on my own morality in my teens, but as I got older I found out the world was a lot more complicated. So I think Vonnegut's writing style is simplistic and his morality misleads a lot of young people. What makes this relevant to me now are Vonnegut's recent political positions. Vonnegut seems to lose the sense of the big picture, sort of like spending all your time chasing after litter bugs while letting the murderers get away. Lately, he's known as a supporter of the ACLU and a critic of the Patriot Act. But who's to say who's right or wrong in the current political alignment? Bush hasn't killed 56 million people yet, so it doesn't seem fair to equate Bush to Hitler. If morality is to have any meaning, one must have a sense of its proportionality. It was the Nazis and the other Axis powers started a war that led to the deaths of 56 million people. The question for readers to decide is whether Vonnegut continues on some level to be an intentional apologist for the Germans during WWII, and whether this should lead to our opinion of him being revised.
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Summary: Slaughterhouse 5
Review: The story centers around Billy Pilgrim, who becomes dislodged in time and travels back and forth between past, present and future. Somewhere between the fire bombings of Dresden in World War II, his capture and imprisonment in a zoo on the planet Tralfamadore by aliens, and his surprising success back on earth in the later years of his life, Vonnegut paints an absurdly, disquietingly hilarious portrait of life, death and much in between. While subtlety is the key to Vonnegut's writing for the story, his explosive understatements do more to blow you away than any more technical language could achieve, so don't be fooled. I often found myself caught off guard and laughing on the bus as I read, or smirking wryly in mid conversation when remembering certain parts of the text. For a quick read with simple language, you'll be amazed at just how much is said in so little. It's a slight mismatch that Slaughterhouse 5 has often been compared to Joseph Heller's Catch 22, as I feel that the two texts have little in common except their absolutely absurd intelligence and the fragmented scene sequences. For lack of a better choice the two can be compared, though I find it to be misleading at best. Both share the resulting impression of a life shattered in the futility of war and convey their messages with an absurd (there's that word again) humour, but I feel that Slaughterhouse 5 widens its scope to include the societal perceptions of "life" in its jeers whereas Catch 22 simply addresses the paradox of war (and with a much, much finer microscope at that). There's a great deal more that could be said about Slaugherhouse 5, and even more still that I'd like to say, but I feel that (like most good novels) it's a book that must be read instead of simply told about, and I don't want to give anything more away to someone that hasn't read it yet. This is your cue now to go out and grab a copy, so go. Check out www dot yourwords dot ca for more.
Rating:
Summary: Simple but great
Review: This was the first book of Kurt Vonnegut's that I read and it got me hooked on him. He has a very simple and honest style of writing that I find very alluring. His books have simple messages and have both broad and finite subjects. Slaughterhouse Five is mainly an anti-war book but it touches on religion and science and free will or destiny also. Throughout the whole book the message of the meaninglessness and atrociousness of war is prevelent and foremost in his theme. Here and there though he touches other themes. He brings Christianity into it a few times and the way that he describes time as always occuring and no such thing as a past, present or future, goes against the human notion of free will which everyone would like to believe and he establishes a minor theme of everything being destined. He also brings a solution to the depression of the realization that we can't avoid bad times and war by saying to focus on the good times. Also the plain fact that the main character, Billy Pilgrim, survives the war, being as scrawny as he is, is a slap in the face to the theory of 'survival of the fittest.' Vonnegut's breadth of subjects along with his witty and simple writing style make this book a treasure.
Rating:
Summary: One of the best books ever.
Review: If you haven't read this you should. It is amazing and Vonnegut is an incredible writer. If you have read it, reread it. I have read it three times. Also if you are a student, it is a great book to chose to read for an assignment or summer reading.
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Summary: You WILL like it.
Review: This is impossible not to like. You'll probably like it, even if you don't like to read. It's just that good.
Rating:
Summary: Beautiful, serenely beautiful
Review: Beautiful, beautiful. In words, ideas, in character, sad, pensive, beautiful. Billy Pilgrim is the aloof soundboard through which the readers uniquely experience (and Vonnegut expresses) the firebombing of Dresden and the comical tragedies of war. I repeated the word "beautiful" because Vonnegut's diction is so simple and transparent like a clear crystal. He has a gift for depicting the fantastic with what is fantastic. For instance, the implicit tragedy of horrendous Dresden burning is counterbalanced by the preceding hilarity of English prisoners of war, and the fantastical abduction of Billy by aliens. Yet, uses the resulting mental jolts to emphasize the tragedy of the war, rather than debase the topic into a light farce.
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