A brilliant novel that hasn't dated at all, sadly.....minor spoilers...

books:

	• Johnny Got His Gun Dalton Trumbo Citadel, 2007 - 320 pages average customer review:based on 290 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Heartwrenching, one book you will never forget.

I read this book at a young age and bought it a couple years ago again. But when I thought about how it made me feel, I could not bring myself to even begin it again. Well I did read it again, a few months ago, and I still think about it. I cannot contribute anything new that other reviewers have not covered. Don't expect a happy ending. Remember that it is set at the end of the first WW but, even still, that you could be Joe.

Unforgetable and Haunting

I read this a young man, and the images it conjured up will haunt me forever. The horror and frustration are unforgetable, and the writing is crisp and vibrant. The ending is both persuasive and lucid and may not turn a war hawk into a pacifist, but it will surely set anyone to thinking.

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A brilliant novel that hasn't dated at all, sadly.....minor spoilers...

I read this book in high school (on my own, it wasn't assigned reading. The assigned reading bored me to death). It has never left me. It's one of the most searing indictments of war ever written. It's brutal, depressing, creepy, terrifying, surreal, and absolutely fascinating. A book like this never really dates, as it is not about one specific war but about war itself.

I'm generally a film person, and I like to rib my literary friends by saying "the movie is always better", but this is one of those cases where the book is vastly superior to the film (even though the film was written and directed by Dalton Trumbo himself, the only film he ever directed). The film came across as amateurish and pretentious, but the book is searing and shockingly unforgettable. To get inside the mind of a man who is nothing but a stump (no legs, no arms, face shot off, but fully conscious and only able to communicate through morse code by tapping his head on the pillow) is as harrowing as they come. I'm glad my high school had this book on their shelves. This along with the biography of Frank Serpico and Native Son (which was assigned reading) were the only 3 books I enjoyed when I was in prison, er, high school. This is still a shattering book, arguably Trumbo's greatest achievement.

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The quintessential anti war book written in 1939.

The quintessential anti war book written in 1939. Based on World War I--the war to end all wars, Dalton Trumbo creates a character, Joe Bonham, who survives a bomb blast in a very singular way. He loses all four limbs, his hearing, his speech, his taste--left only to thin--and feel vibrations and touch.

Trumbo goes further when he adds:"But his latest thing, this inability to tell dreams from thought was oblivion. It made him nothing and less than nothing."

This average Joe can't tell what has happened in his prior life (flashbacks) from dreams or his present reality.

The idea of the book is to describe the worst possible way to survive a war injury, because in doing so, Mr. Trumbo makes war a despicable thing.

"Hell's fire guys had always been fighting for liberty. America fought a war for liberty in 1776. Lots of guys died. And in the end does America have more liberty than Canada or Australia who didn't fight at all?"

Mr. Trumbo takes this regular Joe and leads us through his thoughts about the concepts of liberty, decency, honor, country, and principles in general. The heroe's answer is: "There is no word worth your life." "Nothing is bigger than life. There is nothing noble in death."

The second part of the book deals with the acceptance of Joe's condition. He starts by tracking time by the way the heat hits his face in the morning, the nurses that interact with him. Once he figure how to tell time: "if you can keep track of time you can get a hold on yourself and the world but if you lose it then you are lost too."

After succeeding in telling time, now a few years later, his mind decides that he might be able to communicate with the outside world. tapping his head S. O. S. for several months he finally has a breakthrough when he gets a new nurse during the Christmas holidays. The nurse took off his robe and traced in his body "Merry Christmas"

He thought that for the first time in many years "he was not alone."

This nurse alerts the hospital staff who come and ask Joe "What do you want"

He just wanted to get out--he wanted to be a symbol of what war could do to people so that governments would think harder before deciding to go ever go to war again.

The official answer was that it was "against regulations."

He understood: "He was the future he was the perfect picture of the future and they were afraid to let anyone see what the future was like. Already they were looking ahead they were figuring the future and somewhere in the future they saw war."

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

This was no ordinary war. This was a war to make the world safe for democracy. And if democracy was made safe, then nothing else mattered?not the millions of dead bodies, nor the thousands of ruined lives...This is no ordinary novel. This is a novel that never takes the easy way out: it is shocking, violent, terrifying, horrible, uncompromising, brutal, remorseless and gruesome...but so is war.

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