A Man without a Country

( 43 )

Overview

A Man Without a Country is Kurt Vonnegut’s hilariously funny and razor-sharp look at life ("If I die--God forbid--I would like to go to heaven to ask somebody in charge up there, ‘Hey, what was the good news and what was the bad news?"), art ("To practice any art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow. So do it."), politics ("I asked former Yankees pitcher Jim Bouton what he thought of our great victory over Iraq and he said, ‘Mohammed Ali versus Mr. Rogers.’"), and the condition of the ...
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More About This Book

Overview

A Man Without a Country is Kurt Vonnegut’s hilariously funny and razor-sharp look at life ("If I die--God forbid--I would like to go to heaven to ask somebody in charge up there, ‘Hey, what was the good news and what was the bad news?"), art ("To practice any art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow. So do it."), politics ("I asked former Yankees pitcher Jim Bouton what he thought of our great victory over Iraq and he said, ‘Mohammed Ali versus Mr. Rogers.’"), and the condition of the soul of America today ("What has happened to us?").

Based on short essays and speeches composed over the last five years and plentifully illustrated with artwork by the author throughout, A Man Without a Country gives us Vonnegut both speaking out with indignation and writing tenderly to his fellow Americans, sometimes joking, at other times hopeless, always searching.

Kurt Vonnegut is among the very few grandmasters of contemporary American letters, without whom the very term "American literature" would mean less than it does. His novels include Cat’s Cradle and Slaughterhouse Five, among so many others. Projects with Seven Stories Press in recent years include God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian and, with Lee Stringer, Like Shaking Hands with God, a book about writing. His most recent novel is Timequake (1997).

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Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly
In his first book since 1999, it's just like old times as Vonnegut (now 82) makes with the deeply black humor in this collection of articles written over the last five years, many from the alternative magazine In These Times. But the pessimistic wisecracks may be wearing thin; the conversational tone of the pieces is like Garrison Keillor with a savage undercurrent. Still, the schtick works fine most of the time, underscored by hand-lettered aphorisms between chapters. Some essays suffer from authorial self-indulgence, however, like taking a dull story about mailing a manuscript and stretching it to interminable lengths. Vonnegut reserves special bile for the "psychopathic personalities" (i.e., "smart, personable people who have no consciences") in the Bush administration, which he accuses of invading Iraq so America can score more of the oil to which we have become addicted. People, he says, are just "chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power." Of course, that's exactly the sort of misanthropy hardcore Vonnegut fans will lap up--the online versions of these pieces are already described as the most popular Web pages in the history of In These Times. (Sept.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Very brief essays, displaying the indignant humanism, pacifism and generosity of spirit that made Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five a touchstone of the Vietnam War era. Whether called essays, stories or "an autobiographical collage," this illustrated collection reflects the author's alarm and disgust at what he regards as the subversion of the democratic process by, and the manipulative deceptions of, the current presidential administration. He also denounces the corrupt profiteering of its cronies. As a polemicist, Vonnegut is unsubtle but often funny, as when he blames the unhappiness of the modern individual on the decline of the extended family, observing, "A few Americans, but very few, still have extended families. The Navahoes. The Kennedys." Occasionally, he is shrewd, as when he remarks that while "the most vocal Christians" want to post the Ten Commandments everywhere, no one is clamoring to put up The Beatitudes (Blessed are the meek . . . the peacemakers . . .) in courthouses. Unfortunately, there is a great deal of chaff that must be sifted away. In "Here is a lesson in creative writing," there is a slapdash reading of Hamlet, in which Vonnegut asserts of Polonius, "Shakespeare regards him as a fool and disposable." Vonnegut is at his best when he simply tells us about his enthusiasms: for socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs; for the 19th-century Viennese obstetrician Ignaz Semmelweis, whose work saved the lives of countless mothers and infants; and for Abraham Lincoln. Vonnegut cites a speech Lincoln made while still a member of the House, denouncing the opportunism of then-president Polk in embarking on the Mexican war. "Trusting to escape scrutiny by fixing thepublic gaze upon the exceeding brightness of military glory-that attractive rainbow, that rises in showers of blood-that serpent's eye, that charms to destroy-he plunged into war."An invitation to survey our current circumstances as a nation.
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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780812977363
  • Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
  • Publication date: 1/16/2007
  • Edition description: Reprint
  • Pages: 145
  • Sales rank: 175,726
  • Product dimensions: 5.15 (w) x 8.01 (h) x 0.42 (d)

Meet the Author

Kurt Vonnegut

KURT VONNEGUT was among the few grandmasters of twentieth-century American letters, one without whom the very term American literature would mean much less than it does now. He was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, on November 11, 1922, and died on April 11, 2007, in New York City.

Biography

Born in 1922, Vonnegut grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana. His architect father suffered great financial setbacks during the Depression and was unemployed for long stretches of time. His mother suffered from mental illness and eventually committed suicide in 1944, a trauma that haunted Vonnegut all his life. He attended Cornell in the early 1940s, but quit in order to enlist in the Army during WWII.

Vonnegut was shipped to Europe, fought in the Battle of the Bulge, and was captured behind enemy lines and incarcerated in a German prison camp. As a POW, he witnessed the firebombing of Dresden by Allied forces, an event of devastating magnitude that left an indelible impression on the young soldier.

After the war, Vonnegut returned home and married his high school sweetheart. In addition to two daughters and a son of their own, he and his first wife adopted three children orphaned in 1958 by the death of Vonnegut's sister Alice. (He and his second wife adopted another daughter.) The family lived in Chicago and Schenectady before settling in Cape Cod, where Vonnegut began to concentrate seriously on his writing. His first novel, the darkly dystopian Player Piano, was published in 1952 and met with moderate success. Three additional novels followed (including the critically acclaimed Cat's Cradle), but it was not until the publication of 1969's Slaughterhouse Five that Vonnegut achieved true literary stardom. Based on the author's wartime experiences in Dresden, the novel resonated powerfully in the social upheaval of the Vietnam era.

Although he is best known for his novels (a genre-blending mix of social satire, science fiction, surrealism, and black comedy), Vonnegut also wrote short fiction, essays, and plays (the best known of which was Happy Birthday, Wanda June). In addition, he was a talented graphic artist who illustrated many of his books and exhibited sporadically during his literary career. He died on April 11, 2007, after suffering irreversible brain injuries as a result of a fall.

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    1. Also Known As:
      Kurt Vonnegut
    1. Date of Birth:
      November 11, 1922
    2. Place of Birth:
      Indianapolis, Indiana
    1. Date of Death:
      April 11, 2007
    2. Place of Death:
      New York, New York

Read an Excerpt

1

As a kid I was the youngest member of my family, and the youngest child in any family is always a jokemaker, because a joke is the only way he can enter into an adult conversation. My sister was five years older than I was, my brother was nine years older than I was, and my parents were both talkers. So at the dinner table when I was very young, I was boring to all those other people. They did not want to hear about the dumb childish news of my days. They wanted to talk about really important stuff that happened in high school or maybe in college or at work. So the only way I could get into a conversation was to say something funny. I think I must have done it accidentally at first, just accidentally made a pun that stopped the conversation, something of that sort. And then I found out that a joke was a way to break into an adult conversation.

I grew up at a time when comedy in this country was superb—it was the Great Depression. There were large numbers of absolutely top comedians on radio. And without intending to, I really studied them. I would listen to comedy at least an hour a night all through my youth, and I got very interested in what jokes were and how they worked.

When I’m being funny, I try not to offend. I don’t think much of what I’ve done has been in really ghastly taste. I don’t think I have embarrassed many people, or distressed them. The only shocks I use are an occasional obscene word. Some things aren’t funny. I can’t imagine a humorous book or skit about Auschwitz, for instance. And it’s not possible for me to make a joke about the death of John F. Kennedy or Martin Luther King. Otherwise I can’t think of any subject that I would steer away from, that I could do nothing with. Total catastrophes are terribly amusing, as Voltaire demonstrated. You know, the Lisbon earthquake is funny.

I saw the destruction of Dresden. I saw the city before and then came out of an air-raid shelter and saw it afterward, and certainly one response was laughter. God knows, that’s the soul seeking some relief.

Any subject is subject to laughter, and I suppose there was laughter of a very ghastly kind by victims in Auschwitz.

Humor is an almost physiological response to fear. Freud said that humor is a response to frustration—one of several. A dog, he said, when he can’t get out a gate, will scratch and start digging and making meaningless gestures, perhaps growling or whatever, to deal with frustration or surprise or fear.

And a great deal of laughter is induced by fear. I was working on a funny television series years ago. We were trying to put a show together that, as a basic principle, mentioned death in every episode and that this ingredient would make any laughter deeper without the audience’s realizing how we were inducing belly laughs.

There is a superficial sort of laughter. Bob Hope, for example, was not really a humorist. He was a comedian with very thin stuff, never mentioning anything troubling. I used to laugh my head off at Laurel and Hardy. There is terrible tragedy there somehow. These men are too sweet to survive in this world and are in terrible danger all the time. They could be so easily killed.

Even the simplest jokes are based on tiny twinges of fear, such as the question, “What is the white stuff in bird poop?” The auditor, as though called upon to recite in school, is momentarily afraid of saying something stupid. When the auditor hears the answer, which is, “That’s bird poop, too,” he or she dispels the automatic fear with laughter. He or she has not been tested after all.

“Why do firemen wear red suspenders?” And “Why did they bury George Washington on the side of a hill?” And on and on.

True enough, there are such things as laughless jokes, what Freud called gallows humor. There are real-life situations so hopeless that no relief is imaginable.

While we were being bombed in Dresden, sitting in a cellar with our arms over our heads in case the ceiling fell, one soldier said as though he were a duchess in a mansion on a cold and rainy night, “I wonder what the poor people are doing tonight.” Nobody laughed, but we were still all glad he said it. At least we were still alive! He proved it.

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Table of Contents

1 As a kid I was the youngest 1
2 Do you know what a twerp is? 7
3 Here is a lesson in creative writing 23
4 I'm going to tell you some news 39
5 Okay, now let's have some fun 47
6 I have been called a Luddite 55
7 I turned eighty-two on November 11 65
8 Do you know what a humanist is? 79
9 Do unto others 95
10 A sappy woman from Ypsilanti 105
11 Now then, I have some good news 115
12 I used to be the owner and manager of an automobile dealership 125
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Customer Reviews

Average Rating 4.5
( 43 )
Rating Distribution

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(23)

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See All Sort by: Showing 1 – 20 of 43 Customer Reviews

  • Posted May 16, 2009

    A Man without a Country

    Probably one of my favorite books by Kurt Vonnegut. It's insightful, witty, intriguing, and hilarious. I couldn't put the book down at all. A perfect recommendation for those who love Kurt Vonnegut's humor.

    2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted April 30, 2008

    Short sweet and to the point

    This book sums up all of Vonnegut's thoughts from politics to the planet earth. It is very funny but very true at the same time. It is a quick read but will keep you thinking for a long while. If you havent read anything by Vonnegut you should pick this one up to see who the man realy is.

    2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted July 25, 2009

    more from this reviewer

    Short stories

    I absolutely love Kurt Vonnegut,he is one of my favorite authors. Within his writings of dark subjects, he manages to slide in his sense of humor. This book has short stories about certain subjects of life, such as marriage, sex, war, and the environment. But within these subjects are morals. This is quick read with life meanings attached.

    1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted January 14, 2006

    'The good Earth - we could have saved it, but we were too damn cheap and lazy.'

    For the many of us who are currently disillusioned about the state of the world, nearly caught in the same mud that caused Mark Twain and Albert Einstein to give up on the human race, this joyous little book by veteran American writer Kurt Vonnegut is an elixir. Never one to hold his tongue in pointing out the foibles of mankind, Vonnegut rambles on about the Bush Dynasty, the outrageous abuse of natural resources, the plight of the poor, the essential good of Socialism in its pure state, deriding a country that demands the placement of the Ten Commandments in the classrooms but simultaneously completely ignores the Beatitudes of the sermon on the mount - all the hypocrisies that flood our planet and point toward a gloomy end if we remain oblivious. And yet acerbic and wise though Vonnegut's observations are, he remains funny and gently in praise of music and the arts and especially of the importance of human kindness. In the end this is a memoir of a one of our great writers who gives us a tasty history of his life from his vantage in Indiana to his post of letters in universities, a man who is able to make his observations that sting like napalm, point our attention to the government abuses, tickle our need for love and concern of our natural resources with the master stroke of humanism. So for those who truly care about tomorrow, read this little book, then read it again. It is smart, funny, bracing, and very important. Highly Recommended. Grady Harp

    1 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted January 5, 2006

    Amazing!

    He already has a reputation for 'telling the truth' even in his fiction. But in this book of pseudo-memoirs, Vonnegut doesn't hold back. If you like the current Presidency or drive a large SUV, and can't laugh at yourself, then this book is NOT for you. Sense of humor and ability to think are mandatory.

    1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted July 26, 2011

    Classic

    Ended with a bang Mr. Vonnegut!

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  • Anonymous

    Posted July 30, 2010

    A Truism that lasts cover to cover

    Vonnegut's book is clear, concise, and critical of today. No subject is safe, as he writes about politics, religion, and war. This book would make the most incredible and enthralling documentary. Everything he writes about is real and relatable, and it also written with enthusiasm and Vonnegut's trademark humor.

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  • Posted January 2, 2010

    ipsilateral fundamentals

    Ironic Humor with a twist of hopeful pessimism.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted June 2, 2007

    A sad fall from grace

    A compilation of short works by an aging icon. Mr. Vonnegut toes the line on current social issues in a tiresome tirade without suggesting any solutions. Except to buy some 'Art Works' from a website that he has the nerve to tout in the conclusion of this very thin work. He also repeats the historical urban myth of the death of Ignaz Semmelweis that was put to rest in 1979. Reread God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater and pick this one up on the quick sale table at the bookstore it will be there soon enough.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted April 27, 2006

    Vonnegut rocks!

    Vonnegut continues to have me grinning when I read his work. Talks about modern politics and happpenings. Slightly repetitive from other books, but enlightening as well. Shorter than his other books, yet he did say he would not write another book, so I'll take it as is.

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