DWD's Reviews

The first edition cover Published with the alternate title "The Children's Crusade: A Duty Dance with Death." Originally published in 1969. Listed in Time Magazine's 100 Best Novels Since 1923. Slaughterhouse-Five is the most famous, most celebrated, and most controversial novel of Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007.)  My synopsis: The book serves as a memoir to Vonnegut's horrific experiences as a prisoner of war in World War II and as a sci-fi exploration of the concept of time travel.  Vonnegut's very green unit was rotated to the front in December of 1944 in order to give experienced combat troops a break. The weather was bad, the terrain was bad, and the Germans had been retreating regularly. It was presumed that the Germans would be content to settle in to winter quarters, rest, refit, and pick up the fighting in 1945.  Instead, the Germans launched a surprise offensive and what followed was the Battle of the Bulge . Lots of Americans were captured and taken back...

  Originally published in 1965. After a steady stream of science fiction books, Kurt Vonnegut delivers a straight out social commentary with God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater .  Synopsis: Eliot Rosewater is the heir to a family fortune built on selling munitions in the Civil War and every war after that. The family fortune was built in Indiana but the family has moved to Providence, Rhode Island where it has a family mansion along with all of the others along the waterfront. His father is one of the senators from Rhode Island. The Rosewater family avoids paying income taxes on this vast fortune by funding the Rosewater Foundation. Generally speaking, the foundation has been a legal way to not pay taxes and instead pay Eliot a whole lot of money to do nothing but supervise a foundation that does next to nothing. A mural of Vonnegut in his hometown - Indianapolis. Photo by DWD Eliot is suffering from PTSD (called "combat fatigue" in this book) from his experiences in World War II an...

Published in 2019 by The Great Courses. Lectures by Dorsey Armstrong. Duration: 12 hours, 29 minutes. Unabridged. The Great Courses offers a lecture series by college professors that the average person can listen to on their own time.  In this case, Purdue University history professor Dorsey Armstrong is focusing on the year 1215 as a pivotal year.  1215 is well-known to Americans as the year of the Magna Carta, but it is also the year of the Fourth Lateran Council of the Catholic Church. The rest of the lecture series is about general things that were going on around 1215. These include the crusades, a brief look at the Americas, a look at the Islamic world, Japan, and an extended look at Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire. This is a lecture series that could have used a bit of editing. If two hours were removed, that would have been good. Three hours would have been great. This was especially true in the section about Genghis Khan. Armstrong admitted that she was excited a...

  Published in 1981 by Delacorte Press. Kurt Vonnegut offers this collection (he calls is a "collage") of fiction, non-fiction, interviews, and even a musical based on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.  As is the case with all collections, some parts of the collection are excellent and some parts are not very good. I believe that he first half of the collection is the best, mostly because of the inclusion of a history of the Vonnegut family in Indianapolis. Ironically, it was not written by Vonnegut, but by a family member who had married into the Vonnegut family.  Indianapolis is my adopted hometown and this Vonnegut family history reads like a history of the city from the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s. I found it fascinating reading, especially the story of the subscription brothel gentlemen's club that was frequented by the city's elite in an area that still has political "clubs" with fancy dining and smoking rooms more than 100 years later. It would be tacky to pay ...

Originally published in 1962 Mother Night  is one of Kurt Vonnegut's (1922-2007) early novels (his third) and the first that is not a work of science fiction.  The book features Howard W. Campbell, a defendant awaiting trial in Israel for war crimes in Israel. He is wanted for being a well-known voice for the Nazis on broadcasts that he made during World War II.  Campbell freely admits that he did what they say he did, but he does have a defense - he was working as a double agent for the Americans and was passing secret messages during those broadcasts.  The book sets itself up to be a legal thriller - will the hero of the book be saved? Can he prove what he says is true? But, there's none of that in this book. Campbell probably would have been the voice of the Nazis in the broadcasts no matter if he was recruited as a spy or not? He is just a self-absorbed author of plays that was way more concerned about bedding his German wife than politics or any "trivial" things...

Published by Tantor Audio in 2020. Read by Tom Parks. Duration: 6 hours, 44 minutes. Unabridged. Whitehead and Perry are the first sociologists who set out to do an in-depth study of Christian Nationalism and Christian Nationalists. Whitehead (Indiana University-Purdue University in Indianapolis) and Perry (University of Oklahoma) both hail from states where Christian Nationalism plays a strong role in the political and cultural realms. First, you need a working definition of Christian Nationalism. Whitehead describes it as:    "a cultural framework that is all about trying to advocate for a fusion between Christianity — as they define it — and American civic life." I also like this description by a completely unrelated person,  Rev. Skye Jethani :  "Christians participating in politics or influencing society with their values is NOT Christian Nationalism.  Christians believing they have a God-given right to dominate the government & society by excludi...

  Published in 2020 by Scholastic Audio. Read by Alaska Jackson. Duration: 7 hours, 18 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis: High School senior Liz Lighty is depending on a $10,000 music scholarship to be able to afford to attend the college she has always wanted to go to.  When she discovers that she doesn't get the scholarship, she's afraid her grandparents will sell their house to pay for her college. Her high school offers a $10,000 scholarship for the winner of the Prom Queen competition. Enthusiastic band member Liz, supported by her outsider group of friends, joins the competition against all cheerleaders, legacies, and the beautiful people... My Review: In a lot of ways, this is a typical high school ugly duckling story - the underdog great kid goes up against the popular clique. But, there are some additional nuances that make this more interesting.  The book is set in the Indianapolis area (Indianapolis is my adopted hometown) and the high school in the book (Campbell)...

  Published in 2010 by Indiana Historical Society Press. Alex Vraciu (1918-2015) was a World War II flying ace, ranking fourth in the U.S. Navy in World War II. He destroyed 19 Japanese planes in the air and 21 on the ground.  This short book is very approachable and tells the story of Vraciu's childhood during the Great Depression in Northwest Indiana (now commonly known as "The Region") and his college years at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana.  Vraciu took advantage of a U.S. government program that trained civilians to be pilots with the understanding that if the U.S. went to war those pilots would become military pilots. He trained in Muncie, Indiana and immediately joined the U.S. Navy after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Vraciu had a remarkable military career over the next 23 years. Besides destroying 40 Japanese planes, he lost multiple planes, including being shot down over the Philippines and leading a group of guerrilla figh...

  Originally published in 2006. Published by Listening Library in 2019. Read by Jeff Woodman. Duration: 6 hours, 47 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis: Colin Singleton is a child prodigy who has recently stopped being a child. He has graduated from high school, is preparing to go to a great college but he is unsettled by a couple of things. Number one: being a child prodigy means that you are potentially an important adult. Colin is aware that it is now time for potential to turn into something - anything - meaningful. Number two: Colin just got dumped - again. He has dated 19 different girls and all are named Katherine. Technically it is 18 different girls because Katherine 1 is also Katherine 19, but the point is pretty much the same. So, Colin is wallowing in self-pity when his best friend, a slacker named Hassan, comes to him and suggests that they need to go on a road trip. They head south through Indiana and eventually end up in Gutshot, Tennessee where Colin meets a girl nam...

  Originally published in 1963. Synopsis: Cat's Cradle is Kurt Vonnegut's fourth novel. The narrator is a writer who wants to tell the story of the first atomic bombing by telling what various people did that day. One of the people he is interested in is one of the creators of the bomb, a researcher named Felix Hoennikker.  Hoennikker has already passed away so the author reaches out to his three children and finds two of them. They describe a man with no real emotions. He is not a cruel man, he is utterly detached from everything except research.  During his interviews with a colleagues at the laboratory he worked at in Ilium, New York (also the setting for his first novel Player Piano , but these books are clearly not in the same time line) the narrator discovers that Hoennikker may have invented a more dangerous weapon than the atomic bomb - a substance called "ice-nine." Ice-nine was created as a simple thought experiment that came from an offhand comment from a ...

Originally published in 1952. Synopsis: Paul Proteus is the director of the Ilium Works in New York State in an alternate timeline to our current one. It is roughly the 1950's after yet another World War.  That war taught the engineers to trust mechanization and the government to continue the central planning model that won the war (a more extreme model of the system the real United States used during World War II.) In the Ilium works there are multiple factory buildings full of machines, but there are no people because the whole thing is automated. Proteus and the other engineers replaced all of the people with machines in the name of efficiency. Even the best human workers make mistakes or get an illness and miss work or, eventually, die.  The machines don't have that problem. They work and work and work until the day they are replaced with even faster machines. Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) in 1952 This is the source of the title, Player Piano . A player piano plays itself than...

Published in 2012 by Amazon Publishing. Amazon collected 6 short stories, 1 essay and 1 unfinished sci-fi story and added yet another collection to the Vonnegut library. Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) started writing during the Golden Age of sci-fi, when magazines were filling their pages with short stories. Some of these are sci-fi, some are just little human stories.  Indianapolis native quoting fellow Hoosier author  James Whitcomb Riley's poem "Little Orphan Annie" I particularly enjoyed the first story, called "Between Timid and Timbuktu." It is a "Twilight Zone" type of story that I found satisfying in a gruesome sort of way. I also enjoyed the title story. It actually had a surprise twist that was pretty much out of character for a Vonnegut story.  The seventh entry is an essay from 1992. Vonnegut was a prodigious writer of essays in the latter half of his career. I generally am more of a fan of his caustic and insightful essays than his fiction and ...

  Originally published in 1999. Version with Neil Gaiman foreword published in 2010 by Seven Stories Press . Synopsis: In the late 1990's Kurt Vonnegut made a series of 90 second recordings for WNYC, the local NPR station for New York City. The premise of each spot was simple enough - Vonnegut travels to the afterlife to conduct a very short interview with someone (some famous, some not) and then he brings word back to the land of the living to tell us the wisdom he has learned. How does he get to afterlife? Dr. Jack Kevorkian , the creator of the assisted suicide machine works with Vonnegut to render him about 3/4 dead in the very room and on the very bed where the state of Texas administers the death penalty via lethal injection. One of the people he interviews is a murderer who had just been executed - Karla Faye Tucker, although Vonnegut misspells her first name as Carla. The Vonnegut mural in his hometown of Indianapolis. Photo by DWD. Since he is 3/4 dead, Vonnegut is ab...

  Published in February of 2022 by Brilliance Audio. Read by Seth Podowitz. Duration: 10 hours, 18 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis: Devin Gray is a retired military operator working for a high-end private security contractor. He is on assignment that goes a little sideways in the D.C. metro area and he is sent away to let things cool off. While packing up to go, he is contacted about his mother. She is estranged from the rest of the family because she is always off researching a conspiracy theory, which is kind of ironic because she works in a government intelligence agency that looks for conspiracies. She is dead after some short of shoot out in Tennessee and everyone is keeping it quiet. Gray discovers a note from his mother to him with instructions. It turns out to lead to her evidence that proves the conspiracy and he finds it to be plausible enough to reach out to others. Once they start digging, they find more than it is worse than they ever imagined... My review:  I was e...

  E-book published in October of 2022 by Lake Union. Synopsis: Jack Parker is a stay-at-home dad - but not really by choice. He used to be a big executive in a growing company, but a series of mishaps one Saturday morning led to him being fired and ending up in a humiliating viral video. So, he is at home taking care of a toddler and a kindergartner while his wife is moving up the corporate ladder (different corporation, thank goodness.) He is nervous about his kindergartner starting school and is contemplating going back out in the job market because he can see that the need for a full time stay at home dad during the day is coming close to its end. When he meets his high school bully and nemesis at a local park, he is dismayed. He is more upset to find out that his bully also has a student entering kindergarten at the the same school as his daughter. He decides he has to act when he finds out that the bully is running to be the president of the parent council and is proposing pol...

  Published in 2020 by Seven Stories Press. Edited by Dan Wakefield. Introduction by Dan Wakefield. Many of the well-known quotes from Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) were not actually in his novels - they came from speeches he gave (mostly) in the latter half of his career. Vonnegut became quite a popular deliverer of graduation speeches. And why not? He was witty, irreverent and sometimes came up with a great quote like this one: "Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody want to maintain it." (p. 230) The title of this book comes from a story that Vonnegut has included in other essays. Vonnegut had two uncles who responded very differently to his World War II experiences. His Uncle Dan congratulated Vonnegut for having gone to war as a boy and come back as a man.  His Uncle Alex was a different sort of man. The kind of man who encouraged everyone to notice the good things of life as they happen around us. "...when life was most agreeabl...