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Jailbird
- Narrated by: Richard Ferrone
- Length: 8 hrs and 44 mins
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Publisher's summary
Walter Starbuck, a career humanist and eventual low-level aide in the Nixon White House, is implicated in Watergate and jailed, after which he (like Howard Campbell in Mother Night) works on his memoirs. Starbuck is innocent (his office was used as a base for the Watergate shenanigans, of which he had no knowledge), and yet he is not innocent (he has collaborated with power unquestioningly and served societal order all his life). In that sense, Starbuck is a generic Vonnegut protagonist, an individual compromised by the essential lack of an interior.
Jailbird (1979) uses the format of the memoir to retrospectively trace Starbuck's uneven, centerless, and purposeless odyssey in or out of the offices of power. He represents another Vonnegut Everyman caught amongst forces he neither understands nor can defend. Written in the aftermath of Watergate, Jailbird is, of course, an attempt to order those catastrophic events and to find some rationale or meaningful outcome, and, as is usually the case with Vonnegut's pyrotechnics, there is no easy answer, or perhaps there is no answer at all.
Starbuck (his name an Americanized version of his long, foreign birth name), in his profound ambiguity and ambivalence, may himself constitute an explanation for Watergate, a series of whose consequences have not, decades later, been fully assimilated or understood. The Nixon who passes across the panorama of Jailbird is no more or less ambiguous than Starbuck himself - a man without qualities whose overwhelming quality is one of imposition.
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In 1992, Count Phillippe Pozzo di Borgo, on the heels of his wife's diagnosis with a terminal illness, suffered a paragliding accident that left him a quadriplegic. Forty-two years old, trapped inside his luxurious Paris town house, he was an outcast for the first time in his life. Abdel, an unemployed Algerian immigrant who had been an outcast for his entire existence, would become Phillipe's unlikely caretaker. Quick-thinking, unsentimental, and more than a little wild, Abdel surprises both himself and his employer.
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loved it
- By RockyDog on 01-31-19
By: Abdel Sellou
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Fifth Business
- The Deptford Trilogy, Book 1
- By: Robertson Davies
- Narrated by: Marc Vietor
- Length: 9 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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This first novel in The Deptford Trilogy introduces Ramsay, a man who returns from World War I decorated with the Victoria Cross but who is destined to be caught in a no man's land where memory, history, and myth collide. As we hear Ramsey tell his story, we begin to realize that, from childhood, he has influenced those around him in a perhaps mystical, perhaps pernicious way.
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Been waiting for this
- By Vinity on 12-10-11
By: Robertson Davies
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Secondhand Time
- The Last of the Soviets
- By: Svetlana Alexievich, Bela Shayevich - translator
- Narrated by: Amanda Carlin, Mark Bramhall, Cassandra Campbell, and others
- Length: 22 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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When the Swedish Academy awarded Svetlana Alexievich the Nobel Prize, it cited her for inventing "a new kind of literary genre", describing her work as "a history of emotions - a history of the soul". Alexievich's distinctive documentary style, combining extended individual monologues with a collage of voices, records the stories of ordinary women and men who are rarely given the opportunity to speak, whose experiences are often lost in the official histories of the nation.
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The Heart, Soul & Iron Fist Of Russia
- By Sara on 02-22-17
By: Svetlana Alexievich, and others
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It Can't Happen Here
- By: Sinclair Lewis
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 14 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Doremus Jessup, a newspaper editor, is dismayed to find that many of the people he knows support presidential candidate Berzelius Windrip. The suspiciously fascist Windrip is offering to save the nation from sex, crime, welfare cheats, and a liberal press. But after Windrip wins the election, dissent soon becomes dangerous for Jessup. Windrip forcibly gains control of Congress and the Supreme Court and, with the aid of his personal paramilitary storm troopers, turns the United States into a totalitarian state.
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The Rise of American Authoritarianism
- By David S. Mathew on 11-21-16
By: Sinclair Lewis
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Seize the Day
- By: Saul Bellow
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 3 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Fading charmer Tommy Wilhelm has reached his day of reckoning and is scared. In his forties, he still retains a boyish impetuousness that has brought him to the brink of chaos: he is separated from his wife and children; at odds with his vain, successful father; failed in his acting career (a Hollywood agent once placed him as “the type that loses the girl”); and in a financial mess.
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Why?
- By Ashraf Abaza on 05-16-19
By: Saul Bellow
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Decline and Fall
- By: Evelyn Waugh
- Narrated by: Michael Maloney
- Length: 5 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Sent down from Oxford after a wild, drunken party, Paul Pennyfeather is oddly surprised to find himself qualifying for the position of schoolmaster at a boys' private school in Wales. His colleagues are an assortment of misfits, rascals and fools, including Prendy (plagued by doubts) and Captain Grimes, who is always in the soup (or just plain drunk). Then Sports Day arrives, and with it the delectable Margot Beste-Chetwynde, floating on a scented breeze.
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Black Humor, Satire, and the Absurd
- By Gypsi on 06-09-18
By: Evelyn Waugh
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In the First Circle
- By: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Harry T. Willets - translator
- Narrated by: Derek Perkins
- Length: 31 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Moscow, Christmas Eve, 1949. The Soviet secret police intercept a call made to the American embassy by a Russian diplomat who promises to deliver secrets about the nascent Soviet Atomic Bomb program. On that same day, a brilliant mathematician is locked away inside a Moscow prison that houses the country's brightest minds. He and his fellow prisoners are charged with using their abilities to sleuth out the caller's identity, and they must choose whether to aid Joseph Stalin's repressive state - or refuse and accept transfer to the Siberian Gulag camps, and almost certain death.
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One of the five finest novels written in the 20th Century
- By Ellis D Vener on 04-08-19
By: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and others
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BUtterfield 8
- By: John O'Hara, Lorin Stein - introduction
- Narrated by: Gretchen Mol
- Length: 8 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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A masterpiece of American fiction and a best seller upon its publication in 1935, BUtterfield 8 lays bare with brash honesty the unspoken and often shocking truths that lurked beneath the surface of a society still reeling from the effects of the Great Depression. One Sunday morning, Gloria wakes up in a stranger's apartment with nothing but a torn evening dress, stockings, and panties. When she steals a fur coat from the wardrobe to wear home, she unleashes a series of events that can only end in tragedy.
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Wildly Uneven
- By David P on 08-27-15
By: John O'Hara, and others
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The Patriots
- A Novel
- By: Sana Krasikov
- Narrated by: Suzanne Toren, George Guidall
- Length: 22 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Florence Fein grows up in Brooklyn in the 1930s, in a family that is gaining a foothold in the middle class. At City College she becomes engaged politically with the left-leaning student groups, and eventually, in the midst of the Depression, she takes a job with a trade organization that has a position for her in Moscow. There, she falls in love with another expatriate American and has a son. Soon after, Florence is sent to a work camp and her son to an orphanage.
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Point of View of characters, past and present collide
- By Angela Adams on 01-29-19
By: Sana Krasikov
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Meet Rabo Karabekian, a moderately successful surrealist painter who we meet late in life and see struggling (like all of Vonnegut's key characters) with the dregs of unresolved pain and the consequences of brutality. Loosely based on the legend of Bluebeard (best realized in Bela Bartok's one-act opera), the novel follows Karabekian through the last events in his life that is heavy with women, painting, artistic ambition, artistic fraudulence, and as of yet unknown consequence.
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Kurt Vonnegut explores the arts
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Galapagos takes the listener back one million years to AD 1986. A simple vacation cruise suddenly becomes an evolutionary journey. Thanks to an apocalypse, a small group of survivors stranded on the Galapagos Islands are about to become the progenitors of a brave, new, totally different human race. Kurt Vonnegut, America's master satirist, looks at our world and shows us all that is sadly, madly awry - and all that is worth saving.
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The survival of the human race is a total bore!
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Player Piano
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Kurt Vonnegut's first novel spins the chilling tale of engineer Paul Proteus, who must find a way to live in a world dominated by a supercomputer and run completely by machines. Paul's rebellion is vintage Vonnegut – wildly funny, deadly serious, and terrifyingly close to reality.
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A Genuine 5-Stars
- By R.A. on 06-07-19
By: Kurt Vonnegut
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Welcome to the Monkey House
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- Length: 11 hrs and 24 mins
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Welcome to the Monkey House is a collection of Kurt Vonnegut's shorter works. Originally printed in publications as diverse as The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and The Atlantic Monthly, what these superb stories share is Vonnegut's audacious sense of humor and extraordinary range of creative vision.
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Classic Vonnegut
- By Michael Carrato on 08-17-06
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If I aimed at nothing..nothing is what I would hit
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Hocus Pocus
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Eugene Debs Hartke describes an odyssey from college professor to prison inmate to prison warden back again to prisoner in another of Vonnegut's bitter satirical explorations of how and where (and why) the American dream begins to die. Employing his characteristic narrative device - a retrospective diary in which the protagonist retraces his life at its end, a desperate and disconnected series of events here in Hocus Pocus show Vonnegut with his mask off and his rhetorical devices unshielded.
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Vonnegut Imitating Vonnegut
- By Joe Kraus on 08-06-18
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Bluebeard
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Galapagos
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The survival of the human race is a total bore!
- By Darwin8u on 12-13-16
By: Kurt Vonnegut
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Player Piano
- By: Kurt Vonnegut
- Narrated by: Christian Rummel
- Length: 11 hrs and 31 mins
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Kurt Vonnegut's first novel spins the chilling tale of engineer Paul Proteus, who must find a way to live in a world dominated by a supercomputer and run completely by machines. Paul's rebellion is vintage Vonnegut – wildly funny, deadly serious, and terrifyingly close to reality.
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A Genuine 5-Stars
- By R.A. on 06-07-19
By: Kurt Vonnegut
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Welcome to the Monkey House
- By: Kurt Vonnegut
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Classic Vonnegut
- By Michael Carrato on 08-17-06
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Slapstick
- By: Kurt Vonnegut
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Perhaps the most autobiographical (and deliberately least disciplined) of Vonnegut's novels, Slapstick (1976) is in the form of a broken family odyssey and is surely a demonstration of its eponymous title. The story centers on brother and sister twins, children of Wilbur Swain, who are in sympathetic and (possibly) telepathic communication and who represent Vonnegut's relationship with his own sister who died young of cancer almost two decades before the book's publication.
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Lonely No More!
- By Darwin8u on 11-16-16
By: Kurt Vonnegut
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Mother Night
- By: Kurt Vonnegut
- Narrated by: Victor Bevine
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- Unabridged
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American Howard W. Campbell, Jr., a spy during World War II, is now on trial in Israel as a Nazi war criminal. But is he really guilty? In this brilliant book rife with true gallows humor, Kurt Vonnegut turns black and white into a chilling shade of grey with a verdict that will haunt us all. Mother Night is a daring challenge to our moral sense.
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“We are what we pretend to be”
- By Robert on 09-04-12
By: Kurt Vonnegut
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God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
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- Unabridged
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Eliot Rosewater, a drunk volunteer fireman and president of the fabulously rich Rosewater Foundation, is about to attempt a noble experiment with human nature, with a little help from writer Kilgore Trout. The result is Kurt Vonnegut's funniest satire, an etched-in-acid portrayal of the greed, hypocrisy, and follies of the flesh we are all heir to.
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Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth.
- By Darwin8u on 03-27-14
By: Kurt Vonnegut
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Timequake
- By: Kurt Vonnegut
- Narrated by: Arthur Bishop
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- Unabridged
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According to Kurt Vonnegut's alter ego, the old science fiction writer Kilgore Trout, a global timequake will occur on February 13, 2001, at 2:27 p.m. It will be the moment when the universe suffers a crisis of conscience: Should it go on expanding indefinitely or collapse and make another great big BANG? For its own cosmic reasons, it decides to back up a decade to 1991, giving the world a 10-year case of deja vu, making everybody and everything do exactly what they'd done during the past decade.
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Arias only make hopeless situations worse
- By Darwin8u on 12-28-17
By: Kurt Vonnegut
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Palm Sunday
- By: Kurt Vonnegut
- Narrated by: Tom Stechschulte
- Length: 9 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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In this self-portrait by an American genius, Kurt Vonnegut writes with beguiling wit and poignant wisdom about his favorite comedians, country music, a dead friend, a dead marriage, and various cockamamie aspects of his all-too-human journey through life. This is a work that resonates with Vonnegut's singular voice: the magic sound of a born storyteller mesmerizing us with truth.
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Incredible
- By Anonymous User on 11-17-20
By: Kurt Vonnegut
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The Sirens of Titan
- By: Kurt Vonnegut
- Narrated by: Jay Snyder
- Length: 9 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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The richest, most depraved man on Earth, Malachi Constant, is offered a chance to take a space journey to distant worlds with a beautiful woman at his side. Of course, there's a catch to the invitation....
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Absolutely Outstanding
- By Robert on 01-07-12
By: Kurt Vonnegut
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Breakfast of Champions
- By: Kurt Vonnegut
- Narrated by: John Malkovich
- Length: 6 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Breakfast of Champions (1973) provides frantic, scattershot satire and a collage of Vonnegut's obsessions. His recurring cast of characters and American landscape was perhaps the most controversial of his canon; it was felt by many at the time to be a disappointing successor to Slaughterhouse-Five, which had made Vonnegut's literary reputation.
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Kurt Was Right to Grade This a C
- By Dubi on 01-10-16
By: Kurt Vonnegut
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Pity the Reader
- On Writing with Style
- By: Kurt Vonnegut, Suzanne McConnell
- Narrated by: Karen White
- Length: 12 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Here is an entirely new side of Kurt Vonnegut, Vonnegut as a teacher of writing. Of course he's given us glimpses before, with aphorisms and short essays and articles and in his speeches. But never before has an entire book been devoted to Kurt Vonnegut the teacher. Here is pretty much everything Vonnegut ever said or wrote having to do with the writing art and craft, altogether a healing, a nourishing expedition.
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Unlistenable
- By Grant Swalwell on 01-06-20
By: Kurt Vonnegut, and others
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Cat's Cradle
- By: Kurt Vonnegut
- Narrated by: Tony Roberts
- Length: 7 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Cat's Cradle is Vonnegut's satirical commentary on modern man and his madness. An apocalyptic tale of this planet's ultimate fate, it features a little person as the protagonist; a complete, original theology created by a calypso singer; and a vision of the future that is at once blackly fatalistic and hilariously funny.
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KV at his best.
- By Robert on 06-22-12
By: Kurt Vonnegut
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Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons
- By: Kurt Vonnegut
- Narrated by: Joe Barrett
- Length: 7 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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With cutting wit, fierce conviction, and surprising empathy, Vonnegut explores a diverse range of topics including society, politics, sex, literature, and mortality. Fans who believe they've read all of Vonnegut's work will be delighted to find the author speaking frankly about timely and relevant new topics - with an amusing yet insightful style that's instantly recognizable.
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Vonnegut At His Best
- By Peter W. Kalnin on 12-09-23
By: Kurt Vonnegut
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Armageddon in Retrospect
- By: Kurt Vonnegut
- Narrated by: Rip Torn
- Length: 5 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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The New York Times best seller from the author of Slaughterhouse-Five—a “gripping” posthumous collection of Kurt Vonnegut’s previously unpublished work on the subject of war and peace. A fitting tribute to a literary legend and a profoundly humane humorist, Armageddon in Retrospect is a collection of 12 previously unpublished writings. Imbued with Vonnegut's trademark rueful humor and outraged moral sense.
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Vonnegut should get the nobel peace prize
- By CHARLES on 05-07-12
By: Kurt Vonnegut
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Fates Worse Than Death
- An Autobiographical Collage
- By: Kurt Vonnegut
- Narrated by: Richard Davidson
- Length: 7 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Kurt Vonnegut presents in Fates Worse than Death a veritable cornucopia of his thoughts on what could perhaps best be summed up as "anti-theology", a manifesto for atheism that details Vonnegut's drift from conventional religion, even a tract evidencing belief in the divine held within each individual self--the deity within each individual person present in a universe that otherwise lacks any real order.
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Vonnegut is profound
- By Sarah on 02-03-20
By: Kurt Vonnegut
What listeners say about Jailbird
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Buretto
- 02-21-22
Einstein wrote God a note
I see a lot of reviews saying this is not the best Vonnegut. I don't know. I just know there are brilliant insights to the world, and not just in the time of writing, but still today. And little gems like "Asleep at the Switch" tucked away in the text. Great stuff.
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- Anonymous User
- 09-15-20
Loved it!
His humor is so dry, and the narrator delivered this perfectly! Will definitely relisten to this one.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Frank Friskics
- 09-17-22
Vonnegut writes interesting stories
I don’t know where he gets his ideas and perspectives about the human condition, but he has a way of weaving the very fascinating tails.
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Overall
- Grandma G
- 01-13-17
Story
Read not for a story. Read, or as in my case, listen for KV's message. Thoughtful.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Peter W. Kalnin
- 12-30-23
Another Kilgore Trout Classic
Another Kilgore Trout Classic
Vonnegut at his usual fantastic finest.
Richard Ferrone does an excellent job narrating.
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- Kevin McCoffee
- 03-20-18
Great intro, then slow, then good. It's Vonnegut.
It's Vonnegut. So it's worth it. The very long and personal intro is really great, especially the description of a short story that never came to fruition and in which Vonnegut tried to describe seeing his dad in Heaven. The narrator is solid without being awesome. The book takes you on a historical trip. Why is my overall rating greater than the sum of the performance and the story? It's Vonnegut.
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- Kayla B.
- 10-27-22
Clear narrator with great voice performance
Very clear narrator voice that sounded much how I thought the main character should sound. It was a little bit slow for me so I sped it up to 1.15x speed. As for the story itself it's another Kurt Vonnegut classic, questioning our societal construct through a story with relatabe characters.
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- Amy
- 12-14-22
Excellent
Fantastic story! Loved the creative characterizations & in depth backgrounds of all the characters. Definitely some great quotes!
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- Darwin8u
- 11-18-16
a fool and his self respect are soon parted
“I was making my mind as blank as possible, you see, since the past was so embarrassing and the future so terrifying.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Jailbird
Sometimes, I'm not sure if we are running recklessly toward a Philip K Dick future or a Kurt Vonnegut future. Sometimes, it sure seems like a bit of both. Both authors like to play with ideas of fascism. I think part of the draw, for me, of these two authors right now is how they sensed (Vonnegut especially in this book) the absolute absurdity and reality of economic greed, political malfeasance, incompetence, power, and the inability of the huddled, socialist masses to make much of a damn bit of difference.
Part of Vonnegut's appeal is his everyman's view of things. He doesn't write his books from some ivory tower. His perch seems to be closer to a cranky uncle on a beat up couch, with cigarette burns in his pants, gravy on his shirt, and a wink in his eye.
This is the second book I've read after challenging, bribing my 15-year-old son to read some of my Vonnegut paperbacks. I'm now two books into my own Vonnegut revisit. Peace.
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24 people found this helpful
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- Glenn
- 10-11-18
Even Boring Vonnegut is Masterful
Kurt Vonnegut is one of the greatest writers of the last two centuries. this, however, is not his best. Even still, better than most.
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1 person found this helpful