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Hocus Pocus
- Narrated by: LJ Ganser
- Length: 8 hrs and 40 mins
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Bluebeard
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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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meh.
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Mother Night
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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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Galapagos
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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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Incredible!
- By Greg at 2 Book Lovers Reviews on 2019-02-16
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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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Book was full of "meh"
- By Dennis on 2017-10-18
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Slapstick
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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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Read this when I was 10.
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The Sirens of Titan
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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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Great book. Fantastic narration.
- By Lucas Jalonen on 2018-03-06
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Bluebeard
- The Autobiography of Rabo Karabekian (1916-1988)
- Written by: Kurt Vonnegut
- Narrated by: Mark Bramhall
- Length: 7 hrs and 19 mins
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Overall
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Performance
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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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meh.
- By Justin S. on 2019-10-01
Written by: Kurt Vonnegut
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Mother Night
- Written by: Kurt Vonnegut
- Narrated by: Victor Bevine
- Length: 5 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
Written by: Kurt Vonnegut
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Galapagos
- Written by: Kurt Vonnegut
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 8 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Overall
-
Performance
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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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Incredible!
- By Greg at 2 Book Lovers Reviews on 2019-02-16
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- Unabridged
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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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Book was full of "meh"
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Written by: Kurt Vonnegut
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- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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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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-
Read this when I was 10.
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Written by: Kurt Vonnegut
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- Written by: Kurt Vonnegut
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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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Great book. Fantastic narration.
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Cat's Cradle
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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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Excellent book and recording
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Breakfast of Champions
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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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NOT for me
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Jailbird
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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). He represents another Vonnegut Everyman caught amongst forces he neither understands nor can defend.
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God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
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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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Slaughterhouse-Five
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Traumatized by the bombing of Dresden at the time he had been imprisoned, Pilgrim drifts through all events and history, sometimes deeply implicated, sometimes a witness. He is surrounded by Vonnegut's usual large cast of continuing characters (notably here the hack science fiction writer Kilgore Trout and the alien Tralfamadorians, who oversee his life and remind him constantly that there is no causation, no order, no motive to existence).
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Where’s the old version?
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Written by: Kurt Vonnegut
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Welcome to the Monkey House
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- Length: 11 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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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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not the greatest by one of the greatest
- By Orrin farries on 2020-09-30
Written by: Kurt Vonnegut
Publisher's Summary
Eugene Debs Hartke (named after the famous early 20th century Socialist working class leader) 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.
Debs (and Vonnegut) see academia just as imprisoning as the corrupt penal system and they regard politics as the furnishing and marketing of lies. Debs, already disillusioned by circumstance, quickly tracks his way toward resignation and then fury. As warden and prisoner, Debs (and the reader) come to understand that the roles are interchangeable; as a professor jailed for "radical" statements in the classroom reported by a reactionary student, he comes to see the folly of all regulation.
The "hocus pocus" of the novel's title does not describe only the jolting reversals and seemingly motiveless circumstance which attend Debs' disillusion and suffering, but also describe the political, social, and economic system of a country built upon can't, and upon the franchising of lies. At 68, Vonnegut had not only abandoned the sentiment and cracked optimism manifest in Slaughterhouse-Five, he had abandoned any belief in the system or faith for its recovery. This novel is another in a long series of farewells to the farmland funeral rites of childhood.
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What listeners say about Hocus Pocus
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Bill Westwell
- 2018-09-11
I found the racism to be challenging
I'm going to preface this review with acknowledging the generational difference in social understanding of what sensitivity can be towards racism, sexist, bigotry and patriarchal stances.
Technical was great: Well read, editted and recorded.
I've liked getting into Kurts writing recently, and have torn through a bunch of his stuff enjoying his intelligent flow and humorously casual exposition of social and emotional complexity. So perhaps I'm guilty of bringing my own present day views along with holding him on a bit of recently found literary pedestal as a representative of progressive rationality. This work was hard to witness and difficult ro realize it tarnished my opinion.
While listening to to this, I struggled with my previous love of Vonnegut works (like slaughter house, sirens of titan and breakfast of champions) while I listened to him glorify in ethnic slurs while extolling his own virtues of never swearing as his ethical high water mark. He's as clever as always be with delivery, but he sounds like the unrepentant celebrant of archaic forms of social labelling and hate speech. I found this ridden with triggering racism and brought into glaring focus the missed social opportunities to lean away from the narrative of hate speech and labels. This might have changed the lense that I view his work through. While I'm not going to let it wipe out my enjoyment of his psychotic and enthralling style of story telling, this may be the last of his that I seek out for a while. But then again, Einstein sounds like a racist too. Who am I to judge those from different times with the tools they had available? But I have those better tools now, and this was across my line. Glad to what where he stands, and sad I know I'm no longer on board with it.
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- Norman
- 2022-07-09
Kurt Vonnegut, we miss you
As “Slaughterhouse Five” was Kurt Vonnegut’s WWII novel, this is his Vietnam War novel. It is immensely critical of the Establishment, especially in its treatment of criminals and the disadvantaged.
The “Contemporary “ parts of the story are set In the late 1990s , and I believed they were clever parody of current events.
The book was published in 1990. That’s how good Vonnegut is.
I was pleased to read another tale of Tralfamadore.
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