1. Book Report- Slaughter House-Five
The pacifist author Kurt Vonnegut wrote Slaughterhouse-Five in the late 1960's as the Vietnam War was ending. He used his own military experience from World War II to write this particular book. The main character is Billy Pilgrim who is actually Kurt Vonnegut himself. Vonnegut, like Billy Pilgrim, emerged from a meat locker beneath a slaughterhouse into the moonscape of burned-out Dresden. His surviving captors put him to work finding, burying, and burning bodies. His task continued until the Russians came and the war ended. Dresden is a city in Germany that was heavily bombed during World W...
... writing, and that is the fact that he includes his life experiences and philosophies in his writing. Vonnegut uses his stories to explain his life and innermost thoughts and ideas. "Slaughter House Five" is his greatest example of this. Vonnegut has had a very interesting life which makes for very interesting stories and concepts. Born on November 11, 1922, in Indianapolis, Vonnegut was ... scientific background that he had. Vonnegut quickly became very well- known for his science-fiction touch in the majority of all of his works. This is very prominent in both "Slaughter House Five" an...
... The Nanking Massacre, following hard on the capture of Shanghai, was the first bloodbath in Japan's occupation of China and the first mass slaughter of World War II, during which an estimated 30 million Chinese were killed. Unfortunately, this violent history of Japanese militarism in China and elsewhere ... were raped in their own home. The family was raped and killed on their own tables and beds. When the International Committee entered the house to photograph the incident, they found blood everywhere. The Japanese finally left China when the United States dropped the atomic bombs on ...
... in Rwanda" (105). Imagine the multitude of lives that may have been saved had the international community heeded the warnings given by Dallaire's informant. Despite this knowledge of an approaching slaughter, "the foreign-aid money poured into Habyarimana's coffers, and weapons kept arriving - from France, from Egypt, from apartheid South Africa" (94). When donors occasionally showed concern over the killings of ... events in Somalia in the early 1990s, the United States was tentative about involving their troops peacekeeping missions. In fact, the Presidential Decision Directive 25, a ...
... allow them to forget the cynical struggle of war and to recuperate in a friendly and peaceful atmosphere. One of the places that soldiers were sent to was a place called Talbot House in the Belgian town of Poperinge. Talbot house was a place where soldiers were able to rest and entertain themselves forgetting the cruelties of war for a period of time. In Talbot ... of the person entering did not matter- everyone was equal and, no pessimists were allowed. The house even incorporated a garden, which was extremely rare in the midst of war. At present the house is a museum, with the interio...
... his parents were peasants. His father, Vissarion Dzhugashvili, was a cobbler, hopping that one day his son will be apprenticed in the same trade; his mother, Yekaterina Geladze Dzhugashvili, worked as a house servant for various upper-class Georgian families. Stalin was rather sickly as a child; he was badly scarred by smallpox, and another illness crippled his left arm (later in his life ... Lenin's wife Krupskaya. On December 22, 1922, Stalin found out from one of his sources that Lenin had written a personal letter to Trotsky. Lenin had been previously placed under virtual house arre...
... his parents were peasants. His father, Vissarion Dzhugashvili, was a cobbler, hopping that one day his son will be apprenticed in the same trade; his mother, Yekaterina Geladze Dzhugashvili, worked as a house servant for various upper-class Georgian families. Stalin was rather sickly as a child; he was badly scarred by smallpox, and another illness crippled his left arm (later in his life ... Lenin's wife Krupskaya. On December 22, 1922, Stalin found out from one of his sources that Lenin had written a personal letter to Trotsky. Lenin had been previously placed under virtual house arre...
... boom - my Uncle Terry was born in 1946 - the family started to settle down and make a go of the Post War American dream that included a G.I. Bill mortgage on an old house and a series of used cars. In 1953, my father, Donald was born. This was the height of the Cold War and the United States was undergoing a witch hunt that looked ... basis. There was hardly a basic value or tenant that wasn't called into question regarding our way of life and thought. Cows that were longed considered sacred were put to the slaughter. I wonder how my great grandparents and grandparents accepted these ch...
... the shipping of thousands of Jews to Nazi death camps and make amends. SNCF was looking to lay tracks in Florida and California. Ron Klein, a Florida Democrat in the US House of Representatives, was one of the legislators to oppose SNCF from making business in the US. He introduced a bill seeking to require all companies competing for US high speed rail ... it back," she said (AOL News). In 1999, France's then President Jacques Chirac admitted that the country, under the Vichy regime that worked with the Nazi regime, had "seconded" the slaughter. However, the SNCF maintains that it was ...
... jailed for this. By 1933, there were so many communists and Jews incaracerated that the prisons could not hold them, and the first concetration camp was built at Dachau to house them and eventually exterminate them.# In 1934, Paul Von Hindenburg died, and German law called for another election for the new president. The Nazi party in the Reichstag, however, passed ... -Struthof, Mauthausen, Stutthof and Dora/Nordhausen.# Each time Germany would invade a nation, all the Jews they could find would be rounded up and shipped in box cars, like cattle to slaughter, to these camps. Many did not...
... I had a strong effect on Einstein. While the rest of Germany supported the army, he felt the war was unnecessary, and disgusting. The new weapons of war which attempted to mass slaughter people caused him to devote much of his life toward creating peace. Toward the end of the war Einstein joined a political party that worked to end the war, and return ... original curiosity, religion. While Einstein was visiting America in 1933 the Nazi party came to power in Germany. Again he was subject to anti-Semitic attacks, but this time his house was broken into, and he was publicly considered an...
... of war. The summer of 1914 also marked the beginning of a four year battle that would leave over "nine million dead and over twenty million wounded" (Axelrod, 20). When the slaughter was over, four European empires had been destroyed. This great war left entire cities and country sides in ruins and along with them an entire generation of men. Under conditions ... they fear they will never be able to feel at home anywhere else. When Paul is given leave and returns home, he no longer feels at home in his own house. "I breathe deeply and say over to myself:- "you are at home, you are at ho...
... inequalities of America's economic system, and the miserable behavior of American POWs. Billy falls asleep and wakes up in 1968, where his daughter Barbara is scolding him. Barbara notices the house is icy cold and goes to call the oil-burner man. Billy leaps in time to the Trafalmadorian zoo, where Montana Wildhack, a movie star, has been brought in to mate ... man his two treasures from the lining of his coat: a two-carat diamond and some false teeth. The Americans are brought to their new home, a converted building originally for the slaughter of pigs. The building has a large 5 on i...
... keep his brothers ambitions and bring about a legacy to the United States. In November of 1946, his dreams as a politician, started to flourish. This year he was elected to the House of Representatives from Massachusetts. During the six year term That he served, the U.S. and the Soviet Union where having the Cold War. The Cold War was the struggle, at the ... about 1:07 p.m, exactly two days later after the assassination of the president. The whole world witnesses this event on live broadcasting. They are not sure why Jack Ruby committed this slaughter but they think that they had to do...
... was important is because it saved millions of American and Japanese lives. According to Phil Boas, the United States decided to drop the atomic bombs because "Japan threatened to be a slaughter house from one end of the main land to another." It is said that a massive land invasion would have been needed to try and end the war, and the carnage on ... ...