Saturday, August 13, 2022

Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut: Book 25 of 2022


In 1986, the human race was wiped out, except for a dozen people who escaped from Ecuador to the Galapagos island of Santa Rosalia.  From those dozen ill-matched survivors, after a million years, the human race was reborn as something close to fish.  

The end of the human race in 1986 was the direct result of our brains being too big.  Page after page throughout this very funny story, we learn that our oversized brains lie, are prone to self-deception, to self-regard and all sorts of self-destructive behaviors.  

The Virgil in this tour through the self-created Hell of modern life is a Vietnam War veteran who is the child of a terrible science fiction writer who has one fan in the entire world.  And that fan, a Swedish doctor in Thailand, treats the Vietnam War veteran for syphilis--and sends him to Sweden to be cured. He lives there until he is decapitated in a boatyard and becomes the ethereal guide of the book.

 To quote my last Vonnegut book, "If This Isn't Nice, What Is?"  

You could run out and buy or download the book.  

I got my copy of the book from a barista named Joe who works at The Coffee Bar in Avenel, NJ.  

Thanks Joe! It was as good as you said it was.    





First 24 books of 2022:

The Echo of Greece by Edith Hamilton

If This Isn't Nice, What Is? by Kurt Vonnegut

The War That Made the Roman Empire: Antony, Cleopatra, and Octavian at Actium by Barry S. Strauss. 

Civil Rights Baby by Nita Wiggins

Lecture's on Kant's Political Philosophy by Hannah Arendt

Le grec ancien facile par Marie-Dominique Poree

The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen

Perelandra by C.S. Lewis

The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay

First Principles by Thomas Ricks

Political Tribes by Amy Chua 

Book of Mercy by Leonard Cohen

A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters by Andrew Knoll

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall

Understanding Beliefs by Nils Nilsson

1776 by David McCullough


The Life of the Mind
 by Hannah Arendt

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss

Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

Marie Curie  by Agnieszka Biskup (en francais)

The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche

Fritz Haber, Volume 1 by David Vandermeulen


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