For those who don't know who Dr. Kevorkian is: here you go
For those who don't know who Dr. Kevorkian is, but don't feel like browsing his Wikipedia article, he is a man who supports death-by-choice (assisted suicide) in the cases of terminal patients.
The premise of the book is that Kurt Vonnegut has himself nearly killed hundreds of times by Dr. Kevorkian so he can go towards the Pearly Gates, but not in them, and interview people up in heaven. Each interview only consists of a few questions, and never quite reaches what the reader wants it to. The interviewees (is that a word?) range from everyday heroes and villains to Hitler, Shakespeare, and Isaac Newton.
Overall, I thought the book was kind of neat. I suppose it's probably one of those things that's better in theory to tell your friends about at a social gathering than to have them read on their own and discuss (like the movie Idiocracy, for example). It didn't really waste any of my time, as I read most of it after my Precalulus midterm, but I'm not sure how much it will really help with my research project.
I feel like sharing this quote from the Shakespeare interview:
"I asked him if he had love affairs with men as well as women, knowing how eager my WNYC audience was to have this matter settled. His answer, however, celebrated affection between animals of any sort:
'We were as twinn'd lambs that did frisk in the sun, and bleat the one at the other: what we chang'd was innocence for innocence.' By changed he meant exchanged: 'What we exchanged was innocence for innocence.' That has to be the softest core pornography I ever heard."
No comments:
Post a Comment