| Record Number |
751188 |
| ISBN |
9781609806972 (hardback) |
| Author |
Vonnegut, Kurt author. |
| Title |
If this isn't nice, what is? : the graduation speeches and other words to live by / Kurt Vonnegut ; selected and introduced by Dan Wakefield. |
| Edition |
(Much) expanded second edition. |
| Publisher/Date |
New York : Seven Stories Press, [2016] |
| ©2016 |
| Pagination etc. |
xix, 187 pages : illustrations ; 21 cm. |
| Contents note |
Chiefly consists of selected graduation speeches given by Vonnegut at various educational institutions. |
| Introduction -- Baccalaureate -- How to make money and find love! -- Advice to graduating women (that all men should know!) -- How to have something most billionaires don't -- How music cures our ills (and there are lots of them) -- What the "ghost dance" of the Native Americans and the French painters who led the Cubist movement have in common -- How I learned from a teacher what artists do -- Don't forget where you come from -- Why social justice does more than art to nourish the American dream -- How to be a wise guy or a wise girl -- Why you can't stop me from speaking ill of Thomas Jefferson -- Don't despair if you never went to college! -- How I got my first job as a reporter and learned to write in a simple, direct way, while not getting a degree in anthropology -- Somebody should have told me not to join a fraternity -- The most censored writer of his time defends the First Amendment -- My dog likes everybody, but was not inspired by ancient Greece and Rome or the Renaissance -- Unstuck in time-quotes to ponder. |
| Summary Note |
Best known as one of America's most astonishing and enduring contemporary novelists, Kurt Vonnegut was also a celebrated commencement address giver. Vonnegut never graduated from college, so his words to any class of graduating seniors always carried the delight, and gentle irony, of someone savouring an achievement he himself had not had occasion to savour on his own behalf. But about my Uncle Alex, who is up in Heaven now, Vonnegut, an avowed Humanist, would say sometimes in a graduation speech, one of the things he found objectionable about human beings was that they so rarely noticed it when they were happy. . . . We could be drinking lemonade in the summertime, and Uncle Alex would interrupt the conversation to say, If this isn't nice, what is? If This Isn't Nice, What Is? includes eleven speeches and four pieces of journalism on related themes. Six of the fifteen are new to the second edition on topics as wide-ranging as why it is that Kurt Vonneguts dog loves people more than Kurt Vonnegut does, and what it feels like to be the most censored writer in America and much, much more. In each of these talks and short essays, Vonnegut takes pains to find the few things worth saying and a conversational voice to say them in that's funny and serious and joyful even if sometimes without seeming so. |
| Subject |
Speeches, addresses, etc., American |
| Baccalaureate addresses |
| Added Author |
Wakefield, Dan editor,
author of introduction, etc. |
| Shelf Location |
815.54 VONN |
