Kurt Vonnegut, Revisited

We just spent two blissful days at my Boyfriend's friends' lake house. Golly gee, what perks come with this boyfriend business!

There were six of us, all big time readers. We discussed writers. When that happens, my friend, Kurt's name usually gets bantered about. We all pretty much agreed that his writing got a bit squirrely toward the end of his 82 year old life. But I still loved it. Besides his writing was always somewhat squirrely.

Now, just when we thought there will be no more Vonnegut, a book is coming out containing some of his writings on war and peace. Two of his best subjects.

The July 7th copy of Newsweek carries a remarkable letter from this book, one that Vonnegut wrote to his family in 1945 from a P.O.W. Repatriation Camp in France after being rescued from the Nazis.

The short and to the point letter goes into graphic detail about what happened during that time. While not Vonnegut's later style, the letter tells us that this young man is a writer.

Well, the supermen marched us, without food, water or sleep to Limberg, a distance of about sixty miles, I think, where we were loaded and locked up, sixty men to each small, unventilated, unheated box car. There were no sanitary accommodations - the floors were covered with cow dung. There wasn't room for all of us to lie down. Half slept while the other half stood. We spent several days, including Christmas, on that Limberg siding.

In 1969, he wrote the classic Slaughterhouse-Five depicting the bombing of Dresden, possibly the most beautiful city in the world at the time, by the Americans and the British. Vonnegut was on the ground as a P.O.W.

Actually the full title of this book that is required reading in most of the world's schools is:

Slaughterhouse-Five; or, The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death.

The new book, published by Putnam is:

Armageddon in Retrospect


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