Undoubtedly the best thing to ever come out of Indiana was an unreasonably tall man named Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut is an 82-year-old farting Great Lakes luddite, a self-proclaimed freshwater humanist, a German-American POW who witnessed the bombing of Dresden and lived to tell about it.
He's written a plethora of fiction, enough to make any author envious. However, his latest work, A Man Without a Country, is not his usual fictional hammer bludeoning you with truth, but a straight-forward berating of cultural norms and a veritable slap in the face to wake us out of the witless, braindead passivity that has enveloped American culture.
Kurt, I hope you don't mind if I quote:
"Do you know what a twerp is? When I was in high school in Indianapolis 65 years ago, a twerp was a guy who stuck a set of false teeth up his butt and bit the buttons off the back seats of taxicabs... I consider anyone a twerp who hasn't read the greatest American short story, which is "Occurence at Owl Bridge," by Ambrose Pierce... I consider anyone a twerp who hasn't read "Democracy in America" by Alexis de Tocqueville."
To say anymore would do nothing but limit this work. The man is a master at building prose castles, and I revel in my mediocrity stacking words like bricks. Just buy the damn book.
Read more about "A Man Without a Country".
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1 comment:
i heard vonnegut on the radio being interviewed about his book. powerful. he's a real truth-teller.
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