Rating: 
Summary: Funny fiction
Review: This book may make you laugh out loud. It did me, several times. Like when Walter's date, Sarah, guffaws at his boyish attempt to kiss her, "braying like she was at a Marx brothers' movie." Or something. Walter F. Starbuck's striking characteristic, to me, is his humility. He seems to have no hidden pretenses about his role in the world, never forgets his humble origins, never takes others for granted or assumes he's superior to them. He seems generally to assume he's inferior. Yes, he did make some mistakes, but they don't seem gargantuan (for example, he "ratted" on a one-time friend, mentioning during an investigative hearing that his friend had once been a member of the Communist party). The narrative just keeps rolling until about the end, when poor Mrs. Jack Graham, Walter's first sexual experience, dies as a fantastically wealthy bag lady, in her tennis shoes, as it were, filled with a desultory 4,000 one dollar bills and her last will and testament (to distribute her corporate empire to the American people). The ending just seems slightly abrupt. But one important piece of philosophical advice may have been given by Walter, when he notes that, no matter what course he had taken in his life, it really wouldn't make any difference in a world (which is) just a small iota in an infinitely expanding universe. Except to us? Diximus.
Rating: 
Summary: Vonnegut's best work.
Review: This is a great novel. Unlike some of Vonnegut's bored doodlings (Slapstick, Dead-eye Dick) the ideas in Jailbird and the way the plot is constructed are engaging and provoking. (Not to mention some on-the-ground-and-hold-your-stomach humor)
Rating: 
Summary: Not his best work.
Review: This is my least favorite Vonnegut of the six or seven I've read. It takes a while for things to get started, and even then they never get on a roll. I never had the desire to find out what was going to happen to the protagonist next. I couldn't empathize with him. I found it easy to put this down at night instead of choosing reading over sleep, as it has been with his other books.
Rating:
Summary: Not his best work.
Review: This is my least favorite Vonnegut of the six or seven I've read. It takes a while for things to get started, and even then they never get on a roll. I never had the desire to find out what was going to happen to the protagonist next. I couldn't empathize with him. I found it easy to put this down at night instead of choosing reading over sleep, as it has been with his other books.
Rating:
Summary: actually 4 1/2
Review: This was the first vonnegut book I've read and it threw me quite a curveball. If you're not use to reading a vonnegut book it takes a different mindset. I was confused in the realm of reality. His inclusion of fictional characters in real life events was an interesting twist. I'm currently reading player piano and find it to be a much slower page turner then jailbird. My favorite so far is slaughterhouse five, but jailbird is definitely worth a read.
Rating:
Summary: A beautiful look at how silly the idea of money is
Review: This was the third Vonnegut Book I read, and was definitly my least favorite. I found the story of Starbuck to be somewhat dull and dry at the beginning. While it became more interesting as the book progressed, I never really connected with the story. While it isn't a bad novel, it certainly is not Vonnegut's best. I certainly would suggest reading Cat's Cradle and Slaughter House 5 over this one.
Rating:
Summary: Not my favorite Vonnegut book
Review: This was the third Vonnegut Book I read, and was definitly my least favorite. I found the story of Starbuck to be somewhat dull and dry at the beginning. While it became more interesting as the book progressed, I never really connected with the story. While it isn't a bad novel, it certainly is not Vonnegut's best. I certainly would suggest reading Cat's Cradle and Slaughter House 5 over this one.
Rating:
Summary: Rich With Irony
Review: Vonnegut has a way of combining Orwell's eye with Updike's wit, and the sum is greater still, than the parts.
Jailbird takes readers on a long ride, beginning in WWII and ending somewhere in amoral corporate America, a land where friends come eaiser if you're the head of the "Downhome Records" division of the awesome RAMJAC Corporation.
Vonnegut tells a compelling tale, rich with ironic twists and tiny coincedences, all of which roll nicely into the growing snowball that Jailbird becomes. Jailbird is a fabulous for Vonnegut first-timers, largely because it does not draw on past works the way many of his other classics do.
That said, if you are a Vonnegut reader, you quickly feel at home, comfortably but helplessly watching Walter Starbuck run his life into the ground.
How Vonnegut can paint the world of inalterable predestiny without any sense of cynicism is beyond me, but you never feel a sense of impending doom, only a happy, benign resignation.
All that must be, will be, yet, it's gotta be, so...why not.
This is a book you will reread countless times.
Rating:
Summary: Classic Vonnegut
Review: Vonnegut's "Jailbird" ranks among his best novels. There are so many levels of meaning (as in all of his books) that virtually any reader can take away something different from this book. A well-written satire that makes you think and makes you laugh.
Rating:
Summary: The conscientious civil servant
Review: Walter F. Starbuck, the lovably pathetic hero of Kurt Vonnegut's "Jailbird," makes a potentially fascinating subject for a novel: son of immigrant servants of an eccentric wealthy man, Harvard graduate, ex-communist, well-meaning bureaucrat, squealer to the House Un-American Activities Committee, President Nixon's special advisor on youth affairs, and most recently a record company executive. Oh, and for two years following his service with Nixon he was a distinguished guest of the federal prison system for his circumstantial involvement in the Watergate scandal.
The novel is constructed almost like an autobiography in which Starbuck looks back on the vicissitudes of his life with fatalistic humor. The day that is clearest in his memory is the day he is released from his minimum-security incarceration and flies to New York to resume whatever remains of his life, and this day becomes quite momentous for him as he bumps into some old acquaintances who will change his fortunes possibly for the better.
Starbuck is a compassionate but unemotional observer of the consequences of war on both sides of the Atlantic. His wife Ruth was a Holocaust survivor whom he had saved from poverty when he met her in Nuremberg just after World War II, and his job in Nixon's administration as a youth culture watchdog was a response to the notorious gunning down of four student protesters at Kent State. Corporate encroachment on private enterprise is another theme, as Starbuck finds that the mysterious RAMJAC Corporation is acquiring everything from McDonald's to the New York Times.
"Jailbird" is not at all, as some might expect, a lampoon of Nixon's presidency, but a very general satire of the effects of governmental failure and mass corporatization on American society by the end of the transitional 1970s. This is a comical portrait of a well-educated but wishy-washy man who wanted to be a civil servant because he "believed that there could be no higher calling in a democracy than to a lifetime in government," became a communist pitying the downtrodden workers symbolized by the martyred Sacco and Vanzetti, joined a Republican administration, and eventually moved up to big business. Only in America, as they say.
Vonnegut's humor consists primarily of springing non sequiturs that shock by the nature of their contrast but whose significance becomes apparent later in the story; these can be very funny and clever at times, but after a while one longs for the subtlety of Evelyn Waugh or the erudition of Thomas Pynchon, both of which Vonnegut forgoes in his reckless attempts at meaningful absurdity. Still, "Jailbird" lacks nothing for which Vonnegut is famous; but what it does lack could have made it more than just another Vonnegut novel.
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