Staff Reviews & Reader’s Guides
Recent Reviews:
Message form an Unknown Chinese Mother
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The Book of Lies: A Novel (P.S.) by Mary Horlock
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The Magician's Elephant
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The Tiger's Wife
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Enduring Love
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Slaughterhouse Five
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A mind bending tale of an average man...
Originally published in 1969, Slaughterhouse Five has remained a controversial classic. One of the most frequently banned or challenged books in the US, Slaughterhouse Five is part anti-war tale, part sci-fi adventure. Billy Pilgrim is a man who becomes “unstuck in time”. With no apparent cause Billy begins jumping from point to point in his life, reliving events from his past and experiencing events which have yet to happen. Billy serves in World War II, quickly becoming a German prisoner of war, held in the medieval city of Dresden. Vonnegut based this section of the book on his own POW experiences, including the devastating firebombing of Dresden by Allied troops. Meanwhile, Billy jumps from his war time experiences to the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and his childhood, while also being abducted by aliens who impart wisdom about the meaninglessness of time as humans see it. Billy begins to accept the aliens’ idea that all events happen simultaneously, that time is fluid, and therefore death is not an ending, but just an event on the chain. Vonnegut weaves stories that jump from time to time, place to place, person to person, but at the heart of it all is Billy Pilgrim, a rather average man who is exposed to fantastic events, all within his own average life.
