Rating: 
Summary: A Truly Great Book.
Review: This is a great book that should be re-read annually. It is a mordant and sarcastic black comedy that shows the folly of war and the foibles of that most bureaucratic institution of all, the U.S. military. In this time of a never-ending "War on Terrorism", this is a book that should be read by everyone.
Rating:
Summary: The Great American Novel
Review: Many have tried, but Joseph Heller went ahead and wrote the Great American Novel, Catch-22. If you haven't read it, please consider putting down whatever you are reading and dive into Catch-22 instead.
It's about war, sure, but more than that it's about how the mysterious thing we can Human Nature can make such a mess of things for us humans. Mr. Heller looks into the center of man and sees our fatal flaws and pours them out on page after page in an utterly hilarious way. No one has ever created so many memorable characters in a single book: Major Major Major Major, Colonel Cathcart, Milo Mindbender, and the center of this off-center universe, Captain Yossarian.Read it, you'll like it. And, if you do, I also recommend most of the works of Kurt Vonnegut and my own first novel, Fate (by Mary Jane). Have a nice day.
Rating: 
Summary: Flawed but Funny
Review: Catch-22 is damnably funny. But it suffers as Monty Python's "And Now For Something Completely Different" does - without a defined plot, it is incapable of sustaining a compelling narrative. Its midsection is bogged down with situations invented solely to amuse. It begins wonderfully and ends well, but the middle lays on the black comedy too thick. Heller tries too hard to be funny, and it turns repetitive, which makes it difficult to read all the way through. There are many, many characters. For a comedy they fit their purpose, but as a novel some are simply superfluous, inflating an already long book to even longer proportions. Scheisskopf, for example, in addition to being needlessly vulgar (German for "s**t-head"), has no effect on the plot, nor influence on any characters. Had Heller exercised his right to excise, he could have safely clipped 100 pages. Do we need 2 separate chapters on Milo's escapades as a celebrated food smuggler? Ideas once fresh run foul by the final 3rd of the book's length. Yet Catch-22 is brilliant, despite these surface flaws. The humor is definitely funny the characters memorable, if ersatz, and the rapport between soldiers seemingly real and certainly surreal. But only brilliant, not genius. Slaughterhouse-5 is genius - similarly, it paints World War 2 as absurd, poignant, and occasionally home to black humor, but Vonnegut's book dives deep into a few subjects while Catch-22 chooses to skim lightly over several.
Rating:
Summary: My favorite book
Review: Absolute, unadulterated genius. The funniest book I've ever read, but also the darkest, the most horrifying, and the most enchanting.
Nothing else to say, really, but after a couple of reads it becomes remarkably easy to follow, the jokes still work, your perception of certain characters changes, and it becomes BETTER.
A cornerstone of my life.
And Heller was actually IN World AWar II. He knows what he's talking about.
(The chapter "Snowden" never ceases to give me chills. I gave this to a friend of mine who was way inot joining the Marines. Now it's his favorite, too, and he's not so sure. So the message works.)
Rating:
Summary: Can we laugh about war? Just try not laughing.
Review: This book is savagely funny and deadly serious all in one breath. There's the Texan that kills the soldier in white through unrelenting conviviality, the cat that sleeps on Hungry Joe's face and maybe eventually killing him, the soldier who see everything twice, Major Major Major Major, the atheist chaplain's assistants who run God's service so much better than the believing Chaplain ever could, and then there is the war and the desperate unfunny catch-22 to stay alive in a business that's bound to kill you. I read this book in High School and have finished it off since then about 4 times. It solidified my love for literature. It taught me that to keep our sometimes feeble hold on sanity we have to find the ludicrous and humor in the dead seriousness of reality. It is pacifist's plea to find some sanity to end the state of things where we legally go out to kill each other, trading blows with the enemy underneath the bombardier's sites and the enemies among us. I wonder if Joseph Heller could find Peace quite as tragically funny. "The only thing going on was a war, and no one seemed to notice...Yossarian had proof, because strangers he didn't know shot at him with cannons every time he flew up into the air to drop bombs on them, and it wasn't funny at all. And if that wasn't funny, there were lots of things that weren't even funnier." It's the humor amid the tragedy that in war people die and when people die, there is little laughter and to hold on to your sanity you must laugh. That's a catch isn't it? I'll close this in the words of Jimmy Buffet and thank you Joseph Heller for teaching us well, "If we didn't laugh we'd all go insane."
Rating:
Summary: A very interesting, unusual story
Review: Catch-22 is a very interesting story about a bombardier named Yossarian stationed in Italy during WWII...The whole world seems crazy in this novel and there are plenty of crazy characters that inhabit it. It might sound weird to say, but there really isn't a plot in this story. It's just a bunch of funny and sometimes sad events told in a nonchronological order. This would make the story confusing, but since there isn't really a plot it doesn't really matter. Reading this novel one can tell there are many layers and meanings, but it's not neccessary to delve too deeply into these meanings as the book can be read just for it's hilarity. I found some parts to be laugh-out-loud funny. This book is somewhat hard to describe and one can really only appreciate it if they read it. It's worth reading and I personally got through it very quickly...
Rating: 
Summary: Cynicism's a bore
Review: Tried it twice; couldn't be bothered, really - life's too short! Only amusing if you thought war was a sensible career option for mankind. The book I really want to track down, also published in the 60s, was set amongst the postwar occupation force in Japan (a lot of haiku writing went on, I remember) - can anyone assist?
Rating:
Summary: A war satire...
Review: I got to read this book only a few years ago, and suddenly everyone around me looked as if Im an alien. Catch-22 is really wonderful satire about war. The hilarity is wonderfully woven around the unavoidable tragedy during the war era and Heller beautifully alternates between the two. In a sense it is like Voltaire's Candide where the central character oscillates between optimism and pessimism, only here Yossarian (and others) oscillates between the comic and tragic. While Voltaire's is really a serious satire about the evils that humans perpetuate on one another, that was completed in 3 days, Heller's is more funny yet focused on war, probably starting a new genre - war comics (beetle bailey, mash etc). Its ironic that the movie Catch 22 could not bring out the nuances of the war time that Heller has depicted in the book. He probably also created a style of repeating same thing in different words to make it look funny. Anyway this is great novel not only to be read but also realise the evils of war. Yossarian will surely be an unforgettable character whoever read this book.
Rating:
Summary: "That crazy bastard may be the only sane one left."
Review: My sentiments exactly - spoken by Dr. Stubbs of Yossarian, the prodigious, yet pugnacious protagonist. In a paradoxical world, where the supposedly sane commanding officers run the miltary through methodical madness, the "crazy" Yossarian is deemed so because he values self-preservation over death. The military brass in Catch-22 proves not only utterly pretentious, incomptetent, indolent, and inept, but incongruously insane themselves. General P.P. Peckem ostentatiously states, "My only fault", he pauses for effect,"is that I have no faults." General Peckem is only one of the many well-developed laughable characters developed throughout Catch-22. The general pedestrian reader might say that this is solely another "anti-war" book. I think that would be shallow and inaccurate as Catch-22 is much, much more than that. To me, Catch-22 sparks many thoughts and feelings concerning individuality vs. the system(and the Syndicate) and the willingness of one person in a sea of conformity to have the balls to stand up for what is right regardless what the consequences may be.
Rating:
Summary: irreverent pacifist humor at it's best
Review: contemporary classic; timeless; hilarious.
in short . . . i love it.
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