Putnam Adult
Price: $24.95
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MARK VONNEGUT presents Armageddon in Retrospect a posthumously published collection of writings by his father, KURT VONNEGUT $5 tickets on sale now.
Harvard Book Store is honored to host MARK VONNEGUT for a presentation and discussion of Armageddon in Retrospect, "a posthumous collection of fiction and nonfiction once again plumbing the madness and soul-destroying inhumanities of war" (Kirkus Reviews) by his father, KURT VONNEGUT. "Kurt Vonnegut is gone — but he left behind a final book that's sure to cause a stir. In Armageddon in Retrospect, out this April, the former Army man gives a jolting account of the relentless bombing of Dresden during World War II and how US forces passed out pamphlets to survivors justifying it as the 'unintentional, unavoidable fortunes of war.' He writes: 'The leaflet should have read: We hit every blessed church, hospital, school, museum, theater, your university, the zoo and every apartment building in town, but we honestly weren't trying hard to do it.... So sorry. Saturation bombing is all the rage these days.'" —Page Six, February 1, 2008 "Following an introduction by the author's son Mark, the book opens with a 1945 letter that the former POW Kurt Vonnegut wrote to let his family know that he was alive. It is a masterpiece of understatement and concealment suffused with the rage that animated Vonnegut's writing to the very end. The second piece, one of the highlights of the volume, is a speech he did not live to deliver. It's irreverent, sardonic and elliptical. 'If Jesus were alive today,' he notes, 'we would kill him with lethal injection. I call that progress.' Next is an angry, detailed account of the Dresden bombing, the last nonfiction piece in the collection. Vonnegut blasts American pilots—they killed countless women and children, he asserts—and excoriates military strategists whose goal was to knock out the railroads, which were running two days after the bombing. The remainder of the collection is comprised of ten short stories, most dealing with war and violence, some with the experiences of POWs." —Kirkus Reviews
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Kurt Vonnegut was a master of contemporary American literature. His black humor, satiric voice, and incomparable imagination first captured America's attention in The Sirens of Titan in 1959 and established him as "a true artist" with Cat's Cradle in 1963 and Slaughterhouse-Five in 1969. He was, as Graham Greene declared, "one of the best living American writers.” Mr. Vonnegut passed away in April 2007.
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