From School Library Journal
YA Leon Trout, the ghost of a decapitated shipbuilder, narrates the humorous, ironic and sometimes carping decline of the human race, as seen through the eyes and minds of the survivors of a doomed cruise to the Galapagos Islands. Vonnegut's cast of unlikely Adams and Eves setting out in a Noah's ark includes Mary Hepburn, an American biology teacher and recent widow; Zenji Hiroguchi, a Japanese computer genius (who does not make it to the ship, although his language-translating and quotation-spouting computer does); his wife, Hisako, carrying radiated genes from the atomic bombs; James Wait, who has made a fortune marrying elderly women; and Captain Aolph von Kleist. Also included: six orphaned girls of the Kana-bono cannibal tribe, who will become the founding mothers of the fisherfolk after bacteria render all other women infertile. Serious fans of Vonnegut's wry and ribald prose will welcome this tale of the devolution of superbrained humans into gentle swimmers with small brains, but others may find this Darwinian survival tale too packed with ecological and sociological details that trap the story line in a series of literary devices, albeit very clever ones. Mary T. Gerrity, Queen Anne School, Upper Marlboro, Md.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
[Amazon.com]
So far I'm only on the second chapter and you can automatically tell the sarcastic remarks and that the story is saturated with satire. I think it's very interesting that the story starts off with a quote from Anne Frank: "In spite of everything, I still believe people are really good at heart."
The story begins with a description of the island of Galapagos islands. Vonnegut says that "human begins had much bigger brains back then than they do today" [3] and goes to explain the crazy theories they had in explaining how animals got to those islands from the mainland.
The second chapter we are introduced to a con artist named James Wait. He is a man who feeds on pity. He is "prematurely bald and he was pudgy, and his color was bad, like the crust on a pie in a cheap cafeteria, and he was bespectacled, so that he might plausibly claim to be in his fifties, in case he saw some advantage in making such a claim. He wished to seem harmless and shy." [6]. He's had 17 wives and has emptied out each of their banking accounts. He's a criminal that no one has ever caught because the government thinks he's just 17 different faithless husbands when it is just one man.
Kind of funny to me.
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