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Book Details

Galapagos

57.1% complete
1985
1986
1 time
See 4
Book One - The Thing Was
38 Chapters
Book Two - And the Thing Became
14 Chapters
Book Cover
Has a genre Has a year read Has a rating In my library 
317
No series
Copyright © 1985 by Kurt Vonnegut
In memory of Hillis L. Howie,
(1903-1982) amateur naturalist -
A good man who
took me and my best friend Ben Hitz
and some other boys
out to the American Wild West
from Indianapolis, Indiana,
in the summer of 1938.

Mr. Howie introduced us to real Indians
and had us sleep out of doors every night
and bury our dung,
and he taught us how to ride horses,
and he told us the names of many plants and animals,
and what they needed to do
in order to say alive
and reproduce themselves.

One night Mr. Howie scared us half to death
on purpose,
screaming like a wildcat near our camp.
A real wildcat screamed back.
The thing was: One million years ago, back in A.D. 1986, Guayaquil was the chief seaport of the little South American democracy of Ecuador, whose capital was Quito, high in the Andes Mountains.
May contain spoilers
"You'll learn, you'll learn."
No comments on file
Extract not on file

 

Added: 29-Dec-2002
Last Updated: 03-Dec-2021

Publications

 01-Sep-1985
Delacorte Press
Hardback
In my libraryI read this editionOrder from amazon.comHas a cover imageBook Edition Cover
Date Issued:
Cir 01-Sep-1985
Format:
Hardback
Pages*:
184
Read:
Once
Cover Link(s):
Internal ID:
1505
Publisher:
ISBN:
0-385-29416-6
ISBN-13:
978-0-385-29416-4
Printing:
1
Country:
United States
Language:
English
Credits:
Jeffrey Adams  - Cover Artist
Jill Krementz - Photographer
Wilma Robin - Designer
GALÁPAGOS
KURT VONNEGUT TAKES YOU BACK ONE MILLION YEARS.  TO A.D. 1986 - AND THE BEGINNING OF THE HUMAN RACE.

KURT VONNEGUT LIVES AND WORKS ON THE ISLAND OF MANHATTAN.  HE WAS BORN IN INDIANAPOLIS IN 1922 AND HOLDS A MASTER'S DEGREE IN ANTHROPOLOGY FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO.  HE HAS BEEN TO THE GALÁPAGOS ISLANDS ON A CRUISE.
Cover:
Book Cover
Notes and Comments:
Book club edition.
I got this book in 1986 after learning about Vonnegut in college.
 12-Jan-1999
Delta
Order from amazon.comHas a cover imageBook Edition Cover
Date Issued:
12-Jan-1999
Pages*:
324
Cover Link(s):
Internal ID:
407
Publisher:
ISBN:
0-385-33387-0
ISBN-13:
978-0-385-33387-0
Country:
United States
Language:
English
"BEAUTIFUL... PROVOCATIVE, ARRESTING READING."
- USA Today

KURT VONNEGUT
is a master of contrmporary American literature.  His black humor, satiric voice, and incomparable imagination first captured America's attention in The Sirens of Titan in 1959 and established him as "a true artist"* with Cat's Cradle in 1963.  He is, as Graham Green has declared, "one of the best living American writers."

GALÁPAGOS
takes the reader back one million years, to A.D. 1986.  A simple vacation cruise suddenly becomes an evolutionary journey.  Thanks to an apocalypse, a small group of survivors stranded on the Galápagos Islands are about to become the progenitors of a brave new, a totally different human race.  Here, America's master satirist looks at our world and shows us all that is sadly, madly awry - and all that is worth saving.

"VONNEGUT IS A POSTMODERN MARK TWAIN... GALÁPAGOS IS A MADCAP GENEALOGICAL ADVENTURE."
- The New York Times Book Review

* The New York Times
Cover:
Book Cover
Notes and Comments:
Image File
01-Sep-1985
Delacorte Press
Hardback

Image File
12-Jan-1999
Delta


Related

Author(s)

 Kurt Vonnegut Jr
Birth: 11 Nov 1922 Indianapolis, Indiana, USA
Death: 11 Apr 2007 New York, New York, USA

Notes:
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr was born on November 11, 1922, in Indianapolis, Indiana.  He attended high school at Shortridge High School in Indianapolis at which he had his first experience in writing.  He was a writer and editor for the Shortridge Daily Echo, the first high school daily newspaper in the country.

After graduating in 1940, Vonnegut went Cornell University.  Vonnegut began his college career as a chemistry and biology major.  His older brother Bernard would later discover cloud seeding.  Vonnegut excelled as a columnist and editor for the Cornell Daily Sun when.  In 1943 when he was about to be asked to leave Cornell because of poor grades, he enlisting in the army.

On May 14, 1944, Kurt Vonnegut's mother committed suicide.  His father became a hermit content to be in his own little world.  He died on October 1, 1957.

Vonnegut became a prisoner of war in Germany on December 14, 1944, after being captured in the Battle of the Bulge.  He was sent to Dresden, an city that produced nothing war related and was supposedly off-limits to allied bombing.  On February 13, 1945 allied forces bombed Dresden and killed around 135,000 civilians.  Vonnegut and other POW's were able to survive by waiting in the cellars of their quarters.

On September 1, 1945, Vonnegut married Jane Cox.  He spent the next two years at the University of Chicago as a graduate student.  He worked for the Chicago City News Bureau while there.  His master's thesis was rejected and he moved to New York.  There he worked  as a publicist for General Electric.  On February 11, 1950, Vonnegut's published his first short story, "Report on the Barnhouse Effect."  And soon after he was able to quit his job and move his family to Massachusetts.

He published his first novel in 1952 entitled Player Piano.  By 1959, his 41-year-old sister died from cancer just hours after her husband had died in a train accident.  Vonnegut adopted three of Alice's four children.

Vonnegut published his sixth novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, in 1968 detailing his time in Dresden from the viewpoint of Billy Pilgrim.

He published Breakfast of Champions in 1973 and Slapstick 1976, which was followed by Jailbird in 1979.

He was severely injured in a fire on January 30, 2000 in New York City.

Awards

No awards found
*
  • I try to maintain page numbers for audiobooks even though obviously there aren't any. I do this to keep track of pages read and I try to use the Kindle version page numbers for this.
  • Synopses marked with an asterisk (*) were generated by an AI. There aren't a lot since this is an iffy way to do it - AI seems to make stuff up.
  • When specific publication dates are unknown (ie prefixed with a "Cir"), I try to get the publication date that is closest to the specific printing that I can.
  • When listing chapters, I only list chapters relevant to the story. I will usually leave off Author Notes, Indices, Acknowledgements, etc unless they are relevant to the story or the book is non-fiction.
  • Page numbers on this site are for the end of the main story. I normally do not include appendices, extra material, and other miscellaneous stuff at the end of the book in the page count.






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