⇒ Download Gratis We Are What We Pretend To Be The First and Last Works Kurt Vonnegut 9780306822780 Books

We Are What We Pretend To Be The First and Last Works Kurt Vonnegut 9780306822780 Books

Download As PDF : We Are What We Pretend To Be The First and Last Works Kurt Vonnegut 9780306822780 Books

We Are What We Pretend To Be The First and Last Works Kurt Vonnegut 9780306822780 Books

"Basic Training" is a piece of Americana, a coming-of-age post WWII domestic short story about finding your place in the world that might have been published in "Boys Life" or more likely "The Saturday Evening Post," where it might have been illustrated with a Normal Rockwell tableau representing American ideals and moreover hope.

Hope is one of the main characters. She becomes the object of desire of the kid, the archetype, Haley Brandon, an adolescent naïf with smarts, sincerity and a great stash of innocence who wants to play the piano but ends up - as children often do in this genre - an orphan, toiling dawn to dusk on his uncle's farm outside Chicago.

Hope Cooley, her sisters Kitty and Anne and now Haley make up a Midwestern farm family subjected to the iron will of retired Brigadier General William Cooley, "The General," a tyrant with a cold, cold heart who presides over his family as he led his soldiers, with rules and discipline.

Although the General "tries to solve everything buy saying no," Vonnegut also gives the overbearing head of the family a molecule or two of compassion, and it's discovering this deeply buried bit of empathy that gives the story much of its resonance.

Haley owns the tale and he's our prism for viewing the American nearing the half-century mark, a place that more often than not tends to be no more dangerous "than mice in a corncrib."

There's a hint of Holden Caulfield, Augie March and Huck Finn in the kid, and you get the clear sense the heartland that Haley is growing up in will have room to accommodate his expansive sense of hope and optimism.

The tale is funny, sad, endearing and satiric. It's everything Vonnegut except the science fiction. It's also violent but the violence is delivered in a way that's antiseptic so that when someone ends up with a knife sticking out his chest, there is no blood or gore to mess things up.

Part of a trove of unpublished material, "Basic Training" is an early work, an introduction to a career that shined for a half century. It's Vonnegut off to a great start.


Tags : We Are What We Pretend To Be: The First and Last Works [Kurt Vonnegut] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Called our finest black-humorist by The Atlantic Monthly</i>, Kurt Vonnegut was one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. Now his first and last works come together for the first time in print,Kurt Vonnegut,We Are What We Pretend To Be: The First and Last Works,Vanguard Press,0306822784,Coming of Age,Literary,Satire,College teachers;Fiction.,Farm life;Fiction.,Satire.,20th Century American Novel And Short Story,College teachers,FICTION Coming of Age,FICTION Literary,FICTION Satire,Farm life,Fiction,Fiction - General,FictionComing of Age,FictionSatire,Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945),Vonnegut, Kurt - Prose & Criticism

We Are What We Pretend To Be The First and Last Works Kurt Vonnegut 9780306822780 Books Reviews

Vonnegut was pretty zany and irreverent, but this book starts with his first work( as a teenager) I love it. So innocent, but exciting. His later works are the opposite.
Kurt Vonnegut was not only a head of his time, but I think he is misunderstood by many. His books are masterfully written and always have many layers of meaning. If you haven't read one of his books then you are missing out on one of the greatest writers there ever was.
This is Vonnegut before he was "Kurt Vonnegut Jr. the writer of biting satire and wildly imaginative science-fiction-so-good-they-don't-call-it-science-fiction." The prose lacks Vonnegut's patent terseness and acerbic wit, but it's still darned fine writing. I didn't find the biting satire that the blurb writer claims, but I did find a great little coming of age story and a softer side of Vonnegut than what one encounters in his later works.

It's a fine novella, well worth the modest cost, and I recommend it highly, especially to Vonnegut fans eager to peer into the past and take a peek at the author's humble but very promising beginnings.
Ok, I love Vonnegut, or at least all the Vonnegut books I have read to date. My favorite is Cat's Cradle, and this book actually had a small speck of Cat's Cradle in it, although the plot is very different. This story is certainly lacking in depth and length, which is why it is called a "Novella", so I expected that. As with most Vonnegut books, the key here is characters, great characters that push his story forward. What it lacks a bit is overall story and cohension. You can definitely tell that this is a novel by a beginner, but you can just see a bit of the Master shining through; enough that makes the books enjoyable, and enough to see why he became the writer he did later in life. I think Vonnegut is one of those individuals that was ahead of his time, and that was in the 60's, I imagine he was way out of time in the 40's. It never pays to be TOO far ahead of your time, just ask Galileo!
The first and the last, the "book" consists of his first attempt at published work (it was roundly rejected), 'Basic Training', and his last essay (not finished or intended for publication), 'If God Were Alive Today'.  Basic Training reflects his desire to be a writer; it is carefully written, well-organized, and meticulously crafted.  The title is intentionally misleading, since the essay really seems to imply a sort of basic training that made what the Army later had in store for him almost pale in comparison.  

On the other hand, 'If God Were Alive Today' seems to be a nearing-death attempt to clear his head of all the detritia he'd heard and not previously used that had cluttered his mind and provided no use to him for literary purposes.  It is a final purge of his mental wasteland, and reads like a stream of consciousness sorting through the things he liked in life and those he did not.  

What's not to like?  It is a peek into one of the great minds of late 20th century 'Murrika, and what could be wrong with that?  As he said in other contexts, "Dammit, children, you've got to be kind to one another."  And perhaps that's his legacy.  Do kindness unto others...
"Basic Training" is a piece of Americana, a coming-of-age post WWII domestic short story about finding your place in the world that might have been published in "Boys Life" or more likely "The Saturday Evening Post," where it might have been illustrated with a Normal Rockwell tableau representing American ideals and moreover hope.

Hope is one of the main characters. She becomes the object of desire of the kid, the archetype, Haley Brandon, an adolescent naïf with smarts, sincerity and a great stash of innocence who wants to play the piano but ends up - as children often do in this genre - an orphan, toiling dawn to dusk on his uncle's farm outside Chicago.

Hope Cooley, her sisters Kitty and Anne and now Haley make up a Midwestern farm family subjected to the iron will of retired Brigadier General William Cooley, "The General," a tyrant with a cold, cold heart who presides over his family as he led his soldiers, with rules and discipline.

Although the General "tries to solve everything buy saying no," Vonnegut also gives the overbearing head of the family a molecule or two of compassion, and it's discovering this deeply buried bit of empathy that gives the story much of its resonance.

Haley owns the tale and he's our prism for viewing the American nearing the half-century mark, a place that more often than not tends to be no more dangerous "than mice in a corncrib."

There's a hint of Holden Caulfield, Augie March and Huck Finn in the kid, and you get the clear sense the heartland that Haley is growing up in will have room to accommodate his expansive sense of hope and optimism.

The tale is funny, sad, endearing and satiric. It's everything Vonnegut except the science fiction. It's also violent but the violence is delivered in a way that's antiseptic so that when someone ends up with a knife sticking out his chest, there is no blood or gore to mess things up.

Part of a trove of unpublished material, "Basic Training" is an early work, an introduction to a career that shined for a half century. It's Vonnegut off to a great start.