Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #83483 in Books
• Published on: 2007-08-02
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Customer Reviews

Tedious, boring...typical lefty drivel
Anyone who comes up with the original "Give this to Bush" really does have their head up their own ass.

War only occurs because conditions WORSE THAN WAR exist. Otherwise the net effect would be worse than zero.

Fails to Make Its Point Convincingly
This book chronicles the intermittent dreams and growing consciousness of a young man who wakes up in an army hospital and gradually becomes conscious enough to realize that he's been ripped apart by a bomb: a quadripelegic who has also lost his sight and hearing. The weight of the story is his recollections of his very idyllic life before he went to war.

A popular review of this book remarks that it was kept obscure for several years because it was introduced just as the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939. Obviously, in an era when the Poles had to fight to protect themselves from the open pillaging of their country (which the Nazis carried out in short order), this book's flaws would become too apparent.

Like any argument that rests upon a rare extremity of evidence, JOHNNY GOT HIS GUN fails in its logic. In Poland 1939, men and women who did not go to war were reduced to smoking hulks of flesh simply because they were Jewish or epileptic or dissidents. So Trumbo's argument falls flat. Men who take up the gun may suffer catastrophically, but men who do not take up the gun may also suffer catastrophically.

Another flaw is that a lot of Trumbo's argument is not really against WAR, but is against WARTIME PROPAGANDA. He swaps the two concepts and really batters the straw man of propaganda without ever discussing war itself.

At the end of the book, the reader still has a question unanswered: Is it ever right for a person to pick up a gun and fire at an advancing aggressor? Because that's what war is. And that question is never answered. In the end, partly owing to how very idyllic the young man's life was before he went to war, unrealistically so, and partly because the author seems to confuse Wartime propaganda with War itself, I think the story is tedious, predictable, skewed, and too overtly propagandistic.

Powerful, thought provoking and very sad
I read this book about ten years ago and am re reading it again now. It is one of those stories that stays with you for a long time and makes you think about the realities of war. No glamour, no Hollywood script and no hero, it is plain and simple gut wrenchingly honest. Its not the easiest book to read but its well worth the effort.
If this is based on a real story, as is the romours, then it is a wake up call to those who are pro war. How many other people are kept alive like this? It does not bear thinking about but it is a subject that maybe we should be aware of, espevcialy now we are on the brink of another major war.