Allreaders.com

Message Board

Kurt Vonnegut Message Board 1/1/2012
Talk about the novels, new and used books that Vonnegut has written!

Author Vonnegut's Book Reviews

Bluebeard
Bluebeard was written in 1988. Rabo Karabekian is an old abstract expressionist painter who is obsessive about his painting collection. He his missing one eye from the war. In the beginning the reader learns that he is very private, with a sense of humour. A young woman, Circe Berman shows up on his property and Rabo, not knowing that she planned to stay for a long time, invites her to stay with him. She makes him write to get out his frustrations so he ...
Cat's Cradle
"If I were a younger man, I would write a history of human stupidity," is probably the best single sentence that describes Vonnegut's feeling about the invention of the atomic bomb. This is a humorous pseudo-biography about one of the inventors of the bomb that takes us to the shores of a small little island in the caribbean where the children of one of the fathers of the atomic bomb reveal a military secret. The secret is another invention called Ic...
Deadeye Dick
Rudy Waltz was just a child of 12 when his life changed irrevocably. On a whim, he fired a gun into the air, not knowing that the bullet would kill a pregnant housewife. Ostracized both by this and the fact that his father was once a benefactor of a destitute painter named Adolf Hitler, Rudy seeks to make sense of the world and the town of Midland City, Ohio by writing plays....
Galapagos
Galapagos is an evolutionary journey through time, the story takes place over a million years, as a group of unlikely passengers get lost on a ship that crashes into the Galapagos islands. The story is told by a ghost who died aboard the ship, who shows the reader that evolution is not survival of the fittest but just a game of chance....

Vonnegut booklist

God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
Eliot Rosewater is a member of a rich family and the son of a Republican senator. After serving in the Second World War, Eliot is hospitalized for “combat fatigue” in Paris, where he meets Sylvia who becomes his wife. He finishes up his law degree at Harvard and goes on to get a doctorate in international law. Upon his graduation he is given the presidency of the Goldwater Foundation and the responsibility to oversee $87,000,000, give or take a few hund...
Hocus Pocus
Eugene Debs Hartke is a Vietnam veteran known as the Preacher because he doesn't utter profanities. The book takes place at Tarkington College where Eugene has become a teacher. Across the valley there is a prison for Black prisoners run by a Japanese corporation. The story interweaves Vonnegut's comments on the social woes of mankind and the socio-economic state of America in 2001 with anti war feelings towards WWI WWII Hiroshima and the Vietnam War. ...
Mother Night
Howard W. Campbell is, to most, a war criminal and a traitor to his country. Before World War II, Campbell lived in Germany and married a German actress. Once the war started, he was contacted by American agents who persuaded him to send coded messages in propaganda broadcasts aimed at turning Americans into Nazis. His life is destroyed, his wife disappears, and Campbell is brought back to the U.S. in secrecy. Now, years later, his location is discovered...
Player Piano
Vonnegut gives an excellant synopsis of the irony in human behavior, and the dangers that lie ahead. The book is slightly dated.... but the philosophy isn't....
Slapstick
Wilbur Swain and his sister Eliza Swain are abnormally large and grotesque looking twins who weren't expected to live past the age of 14. Ashamed, their parents sent them as babies to live in a mansion with servants and expensive doctors. There they grew up with a secret intelligence known only to each other. They were only a genius when they were touching physically. They were separated as soon as their secret was out. Wilbur, because he could read and ...
Slapstick, Or Lonesome No More
This book tells the story of the life of Dr. Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain who was the last president of the United States. It follows the destruction of the United States....

Kurt Vonnegut list of books

Slaughterhouse Five
"Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time," kidnapped by space aliens, and put in a zoo/museum on the planet Tralfamadore with an adult film star named Montana Wildhack. Slaughterhouse-Five is a classic anti-war novel about the firebombing of Dresden during World War II. However, most of the book jumps around through time: Billy as a senile widower, Billy on his wedding night, Billy as a soldier, Billy on Tralfamadore. The book starts out during Wo...
Slaughterhouse-Five
Billy Pilgrim is taken to a zoo on another planet where aliens teach him he can exist at any point in time. Billy Pilgrim is a World War II vet that lives in a Balkanized United States of the near future/ alternate future that is then taken to an alien zoo as an exhibit. The aliens teach him that he can exist at any point along his timeline. They encourage him to live in the good times, but being human, his mind takes him to the more traumatic moments. ...
The Sirens of Titan
Malachi Constant is a selfish billionaire until he meets Winston Miles Rumfoord. Rumfoord ran his space ship into a phenomenon that turned him into a timeless wave, materializing regularly at different points in the solar system. He is being manipulated by a robot society on a distant planet to deliver a spare part to their messenger, Salo, on Titan. Rumfoord does some manipulating himself. He tells Constant that he will have a child with his (Rumfo...
Timequake
Timequake is a mixture of autobiography and an account of what happens to the world when a timequake strikes in 2001. The universe shrinks back to 1991 and everyone is forced to relive a decade with no free will. Vonnegut now in his 70s relates stories about his family and friends and has a wise old sage's view of life and the world. Humour in the book springs from what happens when free will is suddenly restored as the timequake comes to an end. In t...