When a boy realises the grown-ups are killing animals and that he has been eating their bodies, he gives up meat. But should he share the truth and break another child's heart? As a youth he wants to believe in the ability of words and peaceful protest to end the slaughter, while struggling to resist a desire for revenge. Now a disillusioned man trying to rebuild his life, he must choose one of two paths. Acceptance means security, but those meat-industry adverts keep taunting him and some familiar insults - smelly pig, dirty cow, chick-chick-chicken - fill his head.

Kurt Vonnegut’s masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five is “a desperate, painfully honest attempt to confront the monstrous crimes of the twentieth century” (Time). Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time Slaughterhouse-Five, an American classic, is one of the world’s great antiwar books. Centering on the infamous World War II firebombing of Dresden, the novel is the result of what Kurt Vonnegut described as a twenty-three-year struggle to write a book about what he had witnessed as an American prisoner of war. It combines historical fiction, science fiction, autobiography, and satire in an account of the life of Billy Pilgrim, a barber’s son turned draftee turned optometrist turned alien abductee. As Vonnegut had, Billy experiences the destruction of Dresden as a POW. Unlike Vonnegut, he experiences time travel, or coming “unstuck in time.” An instant bestseller, Slaughterhouse-Five made Kurt Vonnegut a cult hero in American literature, a reputation that only strengthened over time, despite his being banned and censored by some libraries and schools for content and language. But it was precisely those elements of Vonnegut’s writing—the political edginess, the genre-bending inventiveness, the frank violence, the transgressive wit—that have inspired generations of readers not just to look differently at the world around them but to find the confidence to say something about it. Authors as wide-ranging as Norman Mailer, John Irving, Michael Crichton, Tim O’Brien, Margaret Atwood, Elizabeth Strout, David Sedaris, Jennifer Egan, and J. K. Rowling have all found inspiration in Vonnegut’s words. Jonathan Safran Foer has described Vonnegut as “the kind of writer who made people—young people especially—want to write.” George Saunders has declared Vonnegut to be “the great, urgent, passionate American writer of our century, who offers us . . . a model of the kind of compassionate thinking that might yet save us from ourselves.” More than fifty years after its initial publication at the height of the Vietnam War, Vonnegut’s portrayal of political disillusionment, PTSD, and postwar anxiety feels as relevant, darkly humorous, and profoundly affecting as ever, an enduring beacon through our own era’s uncertainties.

Presents a collection of critical essays about Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-five.

Kurt Vonnegut is one of the most popular and admired authors of post-war American literaturefamous both for his playful and deceptively simple style as well as for his scathing critiques of social injustice and war. Criti.

Billy Pilgrim returns home from the Second World War only to be kidnapped by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore, who teach him that time is an eternal present.

The author relates his experiences working five months undercover at a slaughterhouse, and explores why society encourages this violent labor yet keeps the details of the work hidden.

"The rough-and-tumble world of nineteenth-century New Orleans was a sanitation nightmare, with the city's slaughterhouses dumping animal remains into local backwaters. When Louisiana authorized a monopoly slaughterhouse to bring about sanitation reform, hundreds of independent butchers sued, framing their cases as an infringement of rights protected by the recently passed Fourteenth Amendment. The surviving cases that reached the U.S. Supreme Court pitted the butchers' right to labor against the state's "police power" to regulate public health. The result in 1873 was a controversial 5-4 decision that for the first time addressed the meaning and import of the Fourteenth Amendment. While ruling that Louisiana had legitimately exercised its powers, the Court's majority went much further to declare that the amendment - and its "due process" and "equal protection" clauses - applied exclusively to the plight of former slaves and, thus, were unavailable to any other American."--BOOK JACKET.

Philip Yancey probes the very heartbeat of our relationship with God: prayer. What is prayer? Does it change God's mind or ours or both? This book is an invitation to communicate with God the Father who invites us into an eternal partnership through prayer. Polls reveal that 90 percent of people pray. Yet prayer, which should be the most nourishing and uplifting time of the believer's day, can also be frustrating, confusing, and fraught with mystery. Writing as a fellow pilgrim, bestselling author of What's So Amazing About Grace? Philip Yancey probes such questions as: Is God listening? What should I pray for? If God knows everything, what's the point of prayer? If my prayers go unanswered, is there something wrong with my faith? Why does God sometimes seem close and sometimes seem far away? How can I make prayer more satisfying? In this powerful classic of spiritual insight and investigation, Yancey tackles the tough questions about the mystery of prayer and, in the process, comes up with a fresh new approach to this timeless topic. "I have learned to pray as a privilege, not a duty," writes Yancey, and he invites you to join him on this all-important journey.

The Football Factory centres on Tom Johnson, a reasoned 'Chelsea hooligan' who represents a disaffected society operating by brutal rules. We are shown the realities of life - social degradation, unemployment, racism, casual violence, excessive drink and bad sex - and, perhaps more importantly, how they fall into a political context of surveillance, media manipulation and division. Graphic and disturbing, sometimes very funny, and deeply affecting throughout, The Football Factory is a vertiginous rush of adrenaline - the most authentic book yet on the so-called English Disease.

A bus full of children is taken hostage in this “screaming hit” (The New York Times Book Review) from the author of The Never Game and The Bone Collector. Along a windswept Kansas road, eight vulnerable girls and their helpless teachers are forced off a school bus and held hostage in an abandoned slaughterhouse. The madman who has them at gunpoint has a simple plan: One hostage an hour will die unless the demands are met. Called to the scene is Arthur Potter, the FBI’s best hostage negotiator. He has a plan. But so does one of the hostages—a beautiful teacher who’s willing to do anything to save the lives of her students. Now the clock is ticking as a chilling game of cat and mouse begins.