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Slaughterhouse-Five
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Original price was: $9.99.$8.99Current price is: $8.99.
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Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time, Slaughterhouse-Five, an American classic, is one of the world’s great antiwar books. Centering on the infamous firebombing of Dresden, Billy Pilgrim’s odyssey through time reflects the mythic journey of our own fractured lives as we search for meaning in what we fear most.
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Product name:
Slaughterhouse-Five
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Original price was: $9.99.$8.99Current price is: $8.99.
Patrick Luke –
Excelente obra en edición de pasta dura, con garn sentido y valor !!!!
Tom A. –
This was, and still is, the first Vonnegut book I’ve read and it’s left me wanting more (although the reviews of like every book from him is soo mixed, which is a bit of a deterrent). The story is written in a very interesting way, jumping around but without it being annoying or confusing. The characters are at times very funny, and it’s pretty impressive how he could write about such heavy subjects and keep the seriousness of it while this making it soo much lighter. So it goes…
Binding is not upto the mark. Pages are almost coming out as I read. –
Binding is not upto the mark. Pages are coming
out as I read.
Anoniem –
Het boek blijft maar uitelkaar vallen. Vanaf het begin vielen er al bladzijdes uit. Heb het proberen aan elkaar te lijmen maar het helpt niet.
Amazon Customer –
I wasn’t sure I was going to like this book. It was sort of a book within a book. It starts off with a writer, who I assume was Vonnegut, suffering from writers block. Unable to write about his experiences during WW2, especially the bombing at Dresden, which he witnessed. He complained of having very little recollection of his time in the war. He consulted a friend to see if his experiences dragged his memory. But ended up upsetting the man’s wife, who believed he’d glamorized the experience. After reassuring her he wouldn’t, he delivered to his editor the story of Billy Pilgrim. This is we’re our story takes off. With Billy, a man unstuck from time. The book jumped back and forth through Billy’s life. We saw what shaped the man he would become. His experiences before, during and after the war. Billy was a very unreliable narrator. We didn’t know if this was all a hallucination of his mind. At one point we learn he was kidnapped by 4th dimensional aliens who kept him in a zoo. At the same time he was obsessed with Science Fiction books that depicted the exact same scenario he described. The book was great. Whether, Tralfalmadorians really did kidnap him or not is not clear, but what is clear is that Kurt Vonnegut was an incredible writer.
David R. Anderson –
TIME magazine ranked “Slaughterhouse-Five” twelfth on its list of the 100 best novels of the 20th Century (“Gone With the Wind” was eleventh, “Lolita”, thirteenth). It is an important achievement by any standard, the most significant of Kurt Vonnegut’s work. If a review is in order at this point in time (thirty-six years after its publication) it ought not deal with its merit, that’s a given, but should address some aspect of the work that makes it relevant today. At a time when our country is war-logged, tired to death of the war in Afghanistan, “Slaughterhouse-Five” reminds us of all that is wrong with depending on the military to sort out the world’s problems.
Billy Pilgrim, the hapless World War II Chaplin’s Assistant whose experiences toward the end of the war are at the center of Vonnegut’s tale, could not have been less suited for active duty. Separated from his unit virtually from the time he reached the front at the Battle of the Bulge, he never got his bearings and soon came to grief. Hurting, in way over his head, Pilgrim wanted to be left to die, but couldn’t manage even that. Roland Weary, a buddy, refused to leave him behind, and bullied him along. When captured, Weary and Pilgrim were in such sad shape that their captors published photographs of them “as heartening evidence of how miserably equipped the American Army often was.” Vonnegut, whose actual World War II service provided much of the raw material for the book, never lets the reader forget the reasons for his antiwar views.
These become most clear in the account of the aftermath of the bombing raid on Dresden, the centerpiece of the book. In gross violation of the rules of war, the raid was designed to immolate Dresden’s civilian population in the course of burning the city to the ground. Winston Churchill is said to have approved the raid because he wanted to deal with Stalin at the upcoming Yalta Conference from a position of strength. The fact that adverse weather conditions delayed the planned attack until after Yalta did not persuade Churchill to back off. The great old city of Dresden, a place of no military value, one which the Red Cross considered an open city, i.e. one that would not be bombed, was wiped out.
Billy Pilgrim was part of a small group of American prisoners who were housed (as Vonnegut had been) in a deep underground meat locker, Slaughterhouse-Five, away from the city center. It is where Pilgrim (and Vonnegut) spent the night of the bombing. “There were sounds like giant footsteps above. . . . There was a fire-storm out there. Dresden was one big flame. The one flame ate everything organic, everything that would burn. . . . When the Americans and their guards did come out [the next day], the sky was black with smoke. The sun was an angry little pinhead. Dresden was like the moon now, nothing but minerals. The stones were hot. Everybody else in the neighborhood was dead. So it goes.”
For practical purposes, this gut-wrenching account was for a great many Americans their first accurate look at what had happened to Dresden at the hands of our Eighth Air Force. “Slaughterhouse-Five” not only revealed the extent of the atrocity, it makes clear Vonnegut’s contempt for our government’s efforts to conceal it from us. As Vonnegut writes “Even then [back in the days fairly soon after the War] I was supposedly writing a book about Dresden. It wasn’t a famous air raid back then in America. Not many Americans knew how much worse it had been than Hiroshima, for instance. I didn’t know that either. There hadn’t been that much publicity.” See the End Note.
Vonnegut uses the phrase “so it goes” to emphasize the finality of death. It appears at least 84 times in the book including the one quoted above. The editors of the 2009 Dial Press trade paper edition missed a great chance to use it to good purpose in the brief biographical note on the book’s back cover. It ends: “Mr. Vonnegut passed away in April 2007.” If Vonnegut had been alive to compose that note, he would have added “so it goes.”
End Note. Midway through Chapter 9 of “Slaughterhouse-Five” the narrator, alter ego for the author, states “the thing was, though, there was almost nothing in the 27 volumes [of the “Official History of the Army Air Force in World War Two”] about the Dresden raid, even though it was a howling success.” So true. The account of operations for the night of February13-14 simply says “461 B17s are dispatched to hit the marshaling yard at Dresden (311).” The number in parenthesis apparently refers to the number of targets destroyed in the marshaling yard– a place where”railway [cars] are shunted and made up into trains and where engines, carriages, etc. are kept when not in use.” Contrast that with the account of operations in the Pacific on August 6, 1945: “The world’s first atomic attack takes place. . . . At 0915 hours (0815 hours Japan time) the atomic bomb is released over Hiroshima from 31,600 feet (9,632 meters), it explodes 50 seconds later. 80+% of the city’s buildings are destroyed and over 71,000 people (Japanese figures say from 70,000 to 80,000) are killed.”
jodawaro –
Hmmmm…This was assigned reading for my daughter in 9th grade English and I had to use other resources to educate her about the setting and era of this book. War, post war, current events of the time, reality of the writers experience somehow morphs into highly imaginative and strange situations and storylines that escapes science fiction ideas for the era…
After learning that background context and looking up words, places, people and historical events, she had a better understanding but the writers random style and tangent storylines were bothersome to her. She is an avid reader but this style was confusing and not structured enough for her to enjoy. She read it 3 times thoroughly using Spark notes, Wikipedia, dictionaries and other online resources to help her feel adequate to write her required essay. I read it as well and I found parts entertaining whilst some not so much. It may be a better read for adults than for 14 year olds. She and I do appreciate the additional knowledge and understanding we gained through using the other resources so overall the experience of getting through this was beneficial and worthwhile. It was a good father-daughter activity. She said it reminded her of her grandfather talking about topics that led to telling stories that were somehow related but then after tangent upon tangent and mentioning people she never heard of, except when he mentioned it a few minutes prior, he somehow returned to the original topic and was on to the next topic while her head was still spinning, ha ha ha. I think the writer admits to that style of randomness so there is no fault. Be open minded from the start, disregard the horror of the title, don’t think of it as a holocaust novel (it’s not), allow it to be smart, silly, funny and weird and an enjoyable adventure.
Raquel –
Me gusta mucho esta autor. Recomendado 100%. Buena edición.