And So it Goes Pdf Summary Reviews By Charles J. Shields

And So it Goes Pdf Summary

In 2006, Charles Shields reached out to Kurt Vonnegut in a letter, asking for his endorsement for a planned biography. The first response was no (“A most respectful demurring by me for the excellent writer Charles J. Shields, who offered to be my biographer”). Unwilling to take no for an answer, propelled by a passion for his subject, and already deep into his research, Shields wrote again and this time, to his delight, the answer came back: “O.K.” For the next year—a year that ended up being Vonnegut’s last—Shields had access to Vonnegut and his letters.

And So It Goes is the culmination of five years of research and writing—the first-ever biography of the life of Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut resonates with readers of all generations from the baby boomers who grew up with him to high-school and college students who are discovering his work for the first time. Vonnegut’s concise collection of personal essays, Man Without a Country, published in 2006, spent fifteen weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and has sold more than 300,000 copies to date. The twenty-first century has seen interest in and scholarship about Vonnegut’s works grow even stronger, and this is the first book to examine in full the life of one of the most influential iconoclasts of his time.

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And So it Goes Review


Mal Warwick

TOP 500 REVIEWER

5.0 out of 5 stars So It Goes: The Sad Life of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Reviewed in the United States on December 3, 2011

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The face that peers out at you from the cover is immeasurably sad. It’s the face of a man in middle age weighed down by lifetimes of tragedy. The man — one of the most remarkable novelists of the 20th century — is Kurt Vonnegut, known throughout much of his adult life as Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

In And So It Goes, Charles J. Shields plumbs the depths of Vonnegut’s sadness. He began work shortly before Vonnegut’s death in 2006 and conducted lengthy interviews with his children, his first wife, contemporary writers, business associates, and neighbors. The intimacy and detail of the book is remarkable: a whole man emerges from its pages.

Vonnegut struggled through the first four decades of his long life — he died at 83 — then gradually gained readers through the 1960s until, with the publication of Slaughterhouse-Five in 1969, he became famous “overnight” as he neared the age of 50. After years of eating cereal for dinner and scraping for pennies selling what he regarded as hack stories for the popular magazines of the 1950s and 1960s, he and his wife suddenly found themselves rich as royalties poured in from reprints of his earlier work and as each succeeding book, good or bad, lingered on the best-seller lists for week after week.

Like the best of his novels — Cat’s Cradle, published in 1953, as well as Slaughterhouse-Five — Vonnegut was deceptively complex. In public, Vonnegut affected the manner, even for a time the moustache and the white suit, of his literary hero, Mark Twain. Like Twain, he was folksy and often screamingly funny. A rigid moralist and a plain-spoken opponent of war and defender of freedom of speech, he was idolized by a generation of students and was one of the most popular speakers on college campuses throughout the country during the 1970s and 1980s. In public appearances, Vonnegut generally came across as avuncular, considerate, and witty, often leaving audiences gasping from laughter. At the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop, he proved himself to be a popular and talented teacher.

The man himself, however, though consistently witty throughout his life, bore little other resemblance to his long-time public image. He treated his long-time first wife, Jane, with undisguised contempt, ignored his children and frightened their friends, betrayed his own friends by summarily ending decades-long business relationships, and, in his final years, became intolerably grouchy.

Reflecting the truism that “what goes around comes around,” Vonnegut’s childhood was deeply troubled. His mother, having been raised in luxury and dependent on servants for even the most mundane tasks, was emotionally upended by the Crash of 1929, when the family’s circumstances were sharply reduced. She spent the rest of her life sleeping for days on end and moping about the house, finally killing herself when Kurt was just 21 — on Mother’s Day, 1944. His feckless father, a talented engineer trapped in life as an architect like his brilliant father, paid little attention to Kurt as a child and almost never encouraged him in any way. All the family’s attention was fastened on Kurt’s older brother, Bernard, a gifted scientist who later in life discovered the technique of cloud-seeding to induce rain. When Kurt announced his interest in pursuing studies in the arts, Bernard insisted that he enroll at Cornell to study science, and the younger brother was powerless to resist. He lasted two years there and, later, pursued an anthropology degree at the University of Chicago with a similar lack of success. (Years later, he persuaded the Chicago Anthropology Department to accept his novel Cat’s Cradle in lieu of a thesis and was awarded an M.A.)

Though tragedy in other forms continued to dog Vonnegut in later years, one event stands out as central to his character and his career: the fire-bombing of Dresden in 1945. Vonnegut had enlisted as a private in the U.S. Army the year before and, as his luck would have it, his unit was eventually sent to the Western Front in Europe — positioned at the farthest-forward salient in the Allied lines. Shortly afterward, the Germans attacked in what became known as the Battle of the Bulge. Vonnegut and his buddies were quickly taken prisoner along with thousands of other Americans and marched overland to POW camps in Germany. Eventually, Vonnegut and a small number of his fellow prisoners were taken into Dresden and housed in a old slaughterhouse- very shortly before the horrific fire-bombing attack that killed more than 60,000 civilians. The Americans survived by hiding in a basement. They were put to work once the attack had ended — collecting and stacking corpses.

Is it any wonder why Kurt Vonnegut was cranky? Naturally, none of what he endured can excuse his bad behavior. But it certainly does begin to explain the current of profound sadness that ran throughout Vonnegut’s life.

So it goes.

B. Wilfong

VINE VOICE

4.0 out of 5 stars The person, NOT the persona
Reviewed in the United States on September 29, 2012

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It seems on browsing through some of the reviews of “And So It Goes” that many readers picked up this biography hoping to find the persona that Kurt Vonnegut crafted, as opposed to an honest story about the person. This is not a hit piece, as some reviewers assert, but rather a biography of the man, not the image he cultivated to sell his books. They are two very different things. Charles Shields is a fan of Vonnegut’s, even going so far as to call him “an extraordinary man” in the text’s Introduction. However, he does present him truthfully, and it seems that many fans can’t handle that. I too will admit that I don’t like finding out how much Kurt Vonnegut was not the man in real life that he used as his persona for the author of his novels. It makes me a little sad, but close reading of Vonnegut’s nonfiction pieces alerted me long ago to his bitterness and mean spirit. I just conveniently ignore it. However, Mr. Shields must be truthful in this book, and he is.
I’ll start with bringing up some negatives about the text. On a minor note, there are a few factual errors and inaccurate statements about a couple of Vonnegut’s novels. Not a big deal which I am sure will be cleared up in later prints of the book. Of more consequence (to me) was how Mr. Shields inserts his own opinions about Vonnegut’s novels occasionally into his examination of them. I don’t like this. I am fine with him examining critical receptions and reader responses to the works when they appeared, but his personal thoughts on them should be left alone. It detracts from the objectivity he as the biographer should be trying to create.
However, Mr. Shields shines when he examines Vonnegut’s life and the manner in which it found its way into his masterpiece “Slaughterhouse-Five”. This part of the text is very well done, as is a lovely section on thoughts about the nature of “art” that Vonnegut shared with his scientist brother Bernard. The conversation is recounted on pages 394-396 of the text and is a highlight. The book also ends with an interesting (and short) history of Vonnegut’s ancestors. I am not sure why it ends the book, but it is informative none the less.
On a personal note, if “And So It Goes” and Vonnegut’s life feature a villain it is Vonnegut’s second wife Jill Krementz. If half of what appears in this text is true (and it is all footnoted in the bibliography) then she was and is a horrible woman who did much to bring despair and pain into Vonnegut’s life. The reader will hate her, and be exhausted and troubled by Vonnegut’s never washing his hands of her. Mr. Shields never says this, but I get the feeling he was not too fond of her.
As the first authorized biography of Vonnegut (he was working with Shields when he died) “And So It Goes” is an important text. One of the most important writers of the last century deserves a biography, and now finally he has it.

About Charles J. Shields Author Of And So it Goes pdf Book

Charles J. Shields
Charles J. Shields

Charles J. Shields is the author of And So It Goes pdf book: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life (Henry Holt & Co.), Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee (Holt), the highly acclaimed, bestselling biography of Harper Lee,I Am Scout: The Biography of Harper Lee (Henry Holt Books for Young Readers), and The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel: John Williams, Stoner, and the Writing Life (University of Texas Press).

In January 2022, Henry Holt will release Shields’ new book, Lorraine Hansberry: The Life Behind ‘A Raisin in the Sun,’ the most comprehensive biography of, in James Baldwin’s words, this “very young woman, with an overpowering vision.”

And So it Goes pdf, Paperback, Hardcover Book Information

and so it goes pdf book
and so it goes pdf book
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Henry Holt and Co.; First Edition (November 8, 2011)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 528 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0805086935
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0805086935
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.8 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.49 x 1.71 x 9.53 inches
  • Best Sellers Rank: #143,434 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #54 in Science Fiction & Fantasy Literary Criticism (Books)
  • #80 in Science Fiction History & Criticism
  • #541 in Author Biographies
  • Customer Reviews: 4.5 out of 5 stars    150 ratings

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