Kurt Vonnegut

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Vonnegut Web is a comprehensive site created by Chris Huber in 1995 while he was a grad student at Duke University. While it is not kept right up to date, it contains a lot of information about the often challenged writer. It includes some of Vonnegut's more obscure writings. a chronology of his life, a bibliography, a critical bibliography with suggested resources for research, education, family background and much more information.

Take the Banned Book Challenge. Choose a goal for the number of challenged or banned books you can read between Feb. and June. Let us know about your goal on our form, so we can keep track. Not sure what to read? Check out our suggested reading and the many links on the right side bar.

I Love You, Madame Librarian by Kurt Vonnegut

Slaughterhouse-Five is now on my "must read" list for the "Banned Book Challenge." I was not that familiar with Vonnegut, other than the fact that he is almost the spitting image of a friend of mine. I am fascinated by what I have read about him and how his life inspired his writing. I like his punchy, satiric style. Check out his writing below.

I Love You, Madame Librarian by Kurt Vonnegut

I, like probably most of you, have seen Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. Its title is a parody of the title of Ray Bradbury’s great science fiction novel, Fahrenheit 451. This temperature 451° Fahrenheit, is the combustion point, incidentally, of paper, of which books are composed. The hero of Bradbury’s novel is a municipal worker whose job is burning books.

And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.

And still on the subject of books: Our daily sources of news, papers and TV, are now so craven, so unvigilant on behalf of the American people, so uninformative, that only in books can we find out what is really going on. I will cite an example: House of Bush, House of Saud by Craig Unger, published near the start of this humiliating, shameful blood-soaked year.

In case you haven’t noticed, and as a result of a shamelessly rigged election in Florida, in which thousands of African Americans were arbitrarily disenfranchised, we now present ourselves to the rest of the world as proud, grinning, jut-jawed, pitiless war lovers, with appallingly powerful weaponry and unopposed.

In case you haven’t noticed, we are now almost as feared and hated all over the world as the Nazis were.

With good reason.

In case you haven’t noticed, our unelected leaders have dehumanized millions and millions of human beings simply because of their religion and race. We wound and kill ’em and torture ’em and imprison ’em all we want.

Piece of cake.

In case you haven’t noticed, we also dehumanize our own soldiers, not because of their religion or race, but because of their low social class.

Send ’em anywhere. Make ’em do anything.

Piece of cake.

The O’Reilly Factor.

So I am a man without a country, except for the librarians and the Chicago-based magazine you are reading, In These Times.

Before we attacked Iraq, the majestic New York Times guaranteed that there were weapons of mass destruction there.

Albert Einstein and Mark Twain gave up on the human race at the end of their lives, even though Twain hadn’t even seen World War I. War is now a form of TV entertainment. And what made WWI so particularly entertaining were two American inventions, barbed wire and the machine gun. Shrapnel was invented by an Englishman of the same name. Don’t you wish you could have something named after you?

Like my distinct betters Einstein and Twain, I now am tempted to give up on people too. And, as some of you may know, this is not the first time I have surrendered to a pitiless war machine.

My last words? “Life is no way to treat an animal, not even a mouse.”

Napalm came from Harvard. Veritas!

Our president is a Christian? So was Adolf Hitler.

What can be said to our young people, now that psychopathic personalities, which is to say persons without consciences, without a sense of pity or shame, have taken all the money in the treasuries of our government and corporations and made it all their own?

With thanks to Luminiferous Ether, who is about to become a librarian herself, from whom I cribbed this article about Kurt Vonnegut and admits to shamelessly cribbing it from Michael Moore who shamelessly cribbed it from "In These Times."

Mourning the Passing of A Great Author

Newspapers around the world yesterday reported the death of writer Kurt Vonnegut at the age of 84.

His books such as Cat's Cradle, Breakfast of Champions, and Slaughterhouse-Five faced many challenges over the years, likely for their dark, satiric humour.

The Columbus Dispatch describes his novels as "classics of the American counterculture" and go on to compare his humour to that of Mark Twain.

Like Mark Twain, Vonnegut used humor to tackle the basic questions of human existence: Why are we in this world? Is there a presiding figure to make sense of all this, a god who in the end, despite making people suffer, wishes them well?
He also shared with Twain a profound pessimism.

He was the author of 14 novels and wrote in other genres as well.

His experience of the fire bombing of Dresden during the war was the basis of Slaughterhouse-Five, which was published in 1969, just as America was experiencing the war in Vietnam, racial unrest, and other social upheaval. It struck a chord with American society. The author became a cult hero when Slaughterhouse-Five became a best seller. It was challenged in schools and public libraries for its violence, sexual content and rough language. Vonnegut took on censorship as an active member of the PEN writers' aid group and the American Civil Liberties Union.

Boing Boing offers a podcast of the very first reading of Breakfast of Champions by the author.

A number of people who are signed up for the "Banned Book Challenge" are moving the order of their books or adding a Kurt Vonnegut book to their list, in honour of his passing.