"Bitter coatings on sugar pills."

“I want to be with people who don’t think at all, so I won’t have to think, either. I’m very tired of thinking. It doesn’t seem to help very much. The human brain is too high-powered to have many practical uses in this particular universe, in my opinion. I’d like to live with alligators, think like an alligator.”

More like 3.5

I must say off the bat - I love Kurt Vonnegut. His books were the first "adult" books that really got me into reading. I haven't read anything of his that I haven't liked.

This one is great because it includes speeches, reviews, short stories. It's a different look at Vonnegut's mind, which even in nonficiton is an exciting and beautiful place.

For any fan of Vonnegut's work, this is an eclectic and revealing look into Vonnegut's politics, morality and dark humor. His Playboy interview alone, the final chapter of this book, is worth picking this up for. Several passages deal with Nixon and Republicans in the Vietnam era, and anyone who doesn't see the parallels to our current political crisis is being willfully blind. I don't know if it's comforting to see that our politics seem to be going in an infinite loop, but at least Vonnegut's words give this moment in history more clarity and context. Especially this epitaph: THE WINNERS ARE AT WAR WITH THE LOSERS, AND THE FIX IS ON. THE PROSPECTS FOR PEACE ARE AWFUL.

Абсолютно удоволствие е да се четат нехудожествените текстове на Вонегът, изобилстващи с толкова неподправена локална, регионална, национална и световна история, с известни имена от литературния, културния, научния и светския живот на Америка, за които се говори като за съседа от третия етаж или като за ежеседмичната партия за белот. Или пък като за силебритито, с което се разминаваш от време на време по коридорите на някоя здрание, и все пак миризмата му се е пропила в теб и можеш да го подушиш от киломентри (както вероятно и той теб). Иронията, самоиронията и сарказмът в тези Вонегътови текстове - речи пред студенти, рецензии за книги или просто спомени за хора - са дори по-силни и от тези в книгите му. На моменти тотално се объркваш и не знаеш дали е сериозен, или се шегува - после оставяш за малко книгата настрани, замисляш се и осъзнаваш, че всъщност дали ти самият си бил сериозен или си се шегувал в дадени ситуации, обикновено установяваш години по-късно, ако изобщо. Такъв е животът, такова е човешкото съзнание - и това Вонегът разбира най-добре от всичко, и от това именно черпи основната сила за писаното си слово. Тази малка книжка съвсем спокойно може да мине за списък с крилати фрази и цитати, с които можете да бомбардирате произволни сутиации в живота си, без да има съществен шанс да сбъркате с произволния си избор. А ако случайно сбъркате - съседното изречение ви чака, за да се поправите незабавно, преди почти никой да е забелязъл.

A little of this goes a long way. I haven't read Vonnegut in almost a decade. I'm continually bemused at how weak I'm finding the arguments and sentiments in leftist writing that I enjoyed as a teen to be. In this non-fiction collection, Vonnegut gives us piles of overly general, and generally unimaginative, moralizing - ironic given Vonnegut's fictive inventiveness. One of Vonnegut's rhetorical strategies is to portray himself as isolated in one of his different regional and class aspects when that portrayal is effective for his argument. Though he is Ivy League educated (Cornell, and then some graduate studies at Chicago), the son and grandson of architects, and lived most of his life in New York among the creme de la creme of the American intelligentsia, Vonnegut often trots out this naive Midwestern "Hoosier" personality to give his political observations populist weight (and to serve as an excuse for not delving into technocratic minutiae of large-scale diplomatic issues - nuclear weapons, genocide, etc). But when speaking of life in the Midwest, Vonnegut does so as an upper-class Midwesterner, who fled as soon as he could to never return ("Where is my bed in Indianapolis?"), or to return only in a privileged position - like Professor of Creative Writing at Iowa. The argumentative arrangement of his political speeches approach the non-sequitur, and are articulated in a "wise" voicing that must be a deliberate choice of the author. I find it cloying. I purchased this book with six other Vonneguts at a library sale, which I considered a great find since I am a book-peddler and college-educated white people in their twenties and thirties in Columbus, Ohio, have an undying hard-on for Vonnegut. I consider Vonnegut fans as "Good Democrats" and this book, and re-reading him at a later age, have done nothing to disabuse me of that notion. This is odd, however, because if I am pinned down to provide practical political solutions, they are almost always those that democratic socialists, like Vonnegut, advocate. I don't find myself disagreeing, really, in any way with the positions Vonnegut takes - so why my distaste? I suppose it's because Vonnegut takes these positions, purposefully, in such a general way that no one really could disagree with him. That purposeful generalization, easy to fall in-line with, easy to end debate and feel good with one's self, is deeply irresponsible to me.

I also am beginning to consider Vonnegut the progenitor of the most poisonous of current alt-American sensibilities - quirk. For shame.

The best pieces in this collection are the reporting in Biafra, the short piece on writers' conferences, the observations on Hesse, and the Playboy interview.

It was a slow burn for me, but the intro, the school lectures and Playboy interview were all very strong.

Maybe I should just quote it

“The Vietnam war has proved this. Virtually every American fiction writer was against our participation in that civil war. We all raised hell about the war for years and years—with novels and poems and plays and short stories. We dropped on our complacent society the literary equivalent of a hydrogen bomb.

I will now report to you the power of such a bomb. It has the explosive force of a very large banana-cream pie—a pie two meters in diameter, twenty centimeters thick, and dropped from a height of ten meters or more.”

I love this guy. this is the best. Hes got a little play in here. Stories. Interviews. Speeches. Such a neat guy. I feel like a little worm who got to hang out in his brain.

Nothing less than five stars will do for this one.

I wanted to have a better concept of Vonnegut’s personality in preparation for reading Kurt Vonnegut’s biography “And So It Goes.” I thought a book of non-fiction by KV would be appropriate so I revisited this after nearly 40 years since my first reading. I remembered virtually nothing from my original read. My intent was to read a chapter now and then and to alternate with several books of short stories and non-fiction I’ve been reading. After a short period I realized my attention was exclusively with Vonnegut and devoted all of my attention to this volume. I found Vonnegut’s essays and lectures as fascinating as his fiction, a trait he shares with Jorge Luis Borges.

I was struck by how much Vonnegut’s thinking paralleled my own (If only I could write as well!) and by how compellingly he spoke for so many of my generation. Through all of this his signature mix of poignancy and humor, so typical of his fiction, was present at all times. Among the topics discussed are the Vietnam War, the Biafran tragedy, and the presidential campaign of 1972, particularly relevant in this election year and amazingly timely and prescient.

Poignancy and humor

Timely and prescient.

The More Things Change...

These essays, stories, and observations are all forty-plus years old, but most could have been written last week. Stunning to realize that we have progressed so little in so long. Vonnegut, at his finest, is/was a true prophet. Well worth the time to read and reflect.

El mundo visto con los ojos de Kurt Vonnegut.

Está cool, solo si te gusta mucho Vonnegut, no lo recomiendo para nada si no has leido nada de el o si no te gusta Vonnegut, te va a gustar menos :P

Un par de historias se me hicieron irrelevantes y otro par se me van a quedar para toda la vida. Trae un mix de todo.