I read this book during my lunch breaks at the cafe of Barnes & Noble in Chelsea, NYC. I think I finished it in five sittings, with great big tears rolling down my face. While everybody around me was busy quaffing scalding hot lattes, I was trying to muffle the sounds of my agonized weeping into my scarf. Luckily, this is not seen as strange behavior in Manhattan, so I was able to finish the book unmolested.

Johnny Got His Gun sounds like it was written during the early stages of the Vietnam More...

Every time I read a book, I feel committed to it as if to a relationship. That relationship can be an infatuational fling, a carnal attraction, a passionate love, a committed best friend, a life partner...whatever form it takes will depend on how much I will remember it. Johnny Got His Gun got completely under my skin.

I was finishing the last page on an airplane and an 80 year old yoga teacher looked at me and quietly summed up this book. "I remember reading that. It blew my mind..." She had rea More...

What do you call a guy with no arms and no legs in the water?

Bob.

What do you call a guy with no arms and no legs on a porch?

Matt.

What do you call a guy with no arms and no legs on skis?

Skip.

What do you call a novel about a guy who has no arms and no legs because he happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time?

Johnny Got His Gun.

***

This works best as a character sketch. As poor Jon Bonham's consciousness recalls the events of his childhood, he simultaneously realizes he has missing append More...

La prima guerra mondiale cominciò come una festa d'estate, tutta gonne al vento e spalline dorate. Milioni e milioni di persone sventolavano i fazzoletti dal marciapiede mentre le piumate altezze imperiali, le serenità, i feldmarescialli e altri idioti del genere sfilavano per le strade delle principali città d'Europa alla testa dei loro scintillanti battaglioni. (Dalton Trumbo, introduzione a E Johnny prese il fucile)

Joe Bonham, un ragazzo come tanti altri, parte per la guerra: lascia un lavor More...

One of my favorite books, and it seems, a favorite of many other lovers of peace and justice, I have used this book since 2000 with my senior students to discuss war and our current state of affairs. This book opens up readers to many other types of discussions, however. The fact that we can loose our capacity to act in a flash; or, that we can write the way we think.
Dalton Trumbo was a writer who saw beyond his times and was able to write for future generations, much like Orwell. I feel an aff More...

Infinite Jest has beaten me, again.

Instead, I picked this up. The new edition I got has a new Foreword by a woman named CarolCindy Sheehan, who lost her son Casey in Iraq in 2004. This is on top of the old new Foreword by Ron Kovic -- does that name ring a bell? It should, if you are a reader of war or anti-war novels. He is the writer of the book, and the individual on whom the lead character was based, of Born On The 4th Of July, which was of course about Vietnam. (And was the last and only d More...

This is one of the most memorable books I have ever read.

The protagonist Joe exists a slab of meat after an explosion in a battle during World War I leaves him without arms, legs, deaf and blind, and without a jaw to communicate or nose to smell. He is only kept alive by the diligent care of nurses, of which he knows only their vibrations, and an assortment of feeding tubes and medicinal procedures. The novel highlights how Joe is a prisoner in his own mind, reflecting on the injustice of fighti More...

I finished this book in December of '07, Johnny Got his Gun, and it made me want to shoot myself in the face.
It is written in second person limited, which is annoying enough if not for the added limitation of narrating through a character with no eyes, nose, ears, mouth or limbs. Written primarily in stream-of-consciousness, I simply wanted to cut my eyes out so that I could at least fall asleep on my 5-hour flight. Johnny was supposed to be an anti-war novel, receiving a mountain of praise for More...

Reading this book really makes you realize that war is real. It isn't the crisp uniforms of army officers, the fast air force jets, or the big boom of navy guns that we see in commericals for the armed forces, images that paint a distorted picture of the reality of war.

War it dirty, dispairing, desperate, and destructive.

War is death.

Johnny Got His Gun is a book that shows another face of death. One that is mortally infinite. A death that you live, but you can't escape.

A kind of death where you More...

Katlyn Dahl
14741 SE Mill St
Portland , OR 97233
March 14, 2013

Rod Boettcher
Position 6- At large
18135 SE Brooklyn
Portland, OR 97236

Dear Mr. Rod Boettcher:

Oscar Wilde once said, “The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame.” Wilde is 100 percent correct, and the books that societies have tried to ban are not as gruesome as they seem. My name is Katlyn Dahl, I am student at Centennial High School , and I am writing to you to encourage you to say no to book b More...

The book “Johnny Got His Gun” was written by Dalton Trumbo and published in the year 1939. The main character’s name is Joe, and he went to war and ended up losing his arms, legs, and face. Due to these loses; he has to learn throughout the book how to deal with his conditions. The controversy over this book being in high school libraries is that this book has an anti-war theme to it, so it was discouraged by many people. This book was very discouraged not only because of the anti-war theme, but More...

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 More...

I conceive there may be no finer novel illustrating the moral argument behind the anti-war stance. While it's reason's duty to convince and persuade, the heart is often far more obstinate than the head, and to sway a person's feelings to your favour can be difficult indeed. Fear is, perhaps, the strongest, most primal of all emotions, and in large part it is on this base drive that a pro-war argument is constructed. When a country stands by and watches a war commence beyond its borders, hawks ar More...

“He would do a favor to everybody including himself. He would show himself to the little guys and to their mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters and wives and sweethearts and grandmothers and grandfathers and he would have a sign over himself and the sign would say here is war and would concentrate the whole war into such a small piece of meat and bone and hair and they would never forget it as long as they lived” –Johnny Got His Gun (pg. 225).

Joe Bonham is a young man, a revolutionary, a More...

Who exactly is Dalton Trumbo? Dalton Trumbo was a screenwriter and novelist in the early 1900s. He wrote the screenplay for the smash hits Exodus and Spartacus while blacklisted by a paranoid regime in Hollywood in the 1950s. He also wrote books along with screenplays.

Johnny Got His Gun was written post WWI and shortly before WWII. In fact, this book was set in WWI, but not exactly in the war. The entire novel is set in the mind of one man who fought in WWI. Joe Bonham: the man who wakes up hard More...

Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo is a heartbreaking book to say the least. This book not only makes you feel,it really finds a way to get into your head and have you think long and hard. It is a severe understatement to say this is just a cautionary tale of war. This is the eye of nightmare which is known as war. This book becomes more horrifying when you realize this is not just a story that someone thought up. This is a true story of real of events for one unlucky solider named Joe Bonham. More...

God, this was such a tough read emotionally. Some of the passages in this book, like any good book, kicked my ass. I have been reading a lot of these type of books lately. I think I need to get out of this rabbit hole for a bit, because there is only so much I can endure in the name of ugly reality. With that said, this book has just helped me reinforce my stance on war. War is thousands of years of well documented ultra expensive stupidity. These governments and the media who tell us lies to ma More...

“E Johnny prese il fucile” non è semplicemente un libro contro la guerra e le sue conseguenze: o meglio, è anche questo, ma è soprattutto un libro contro l’ipocrisia con cui i governi propagandano l’intervento militare e la manipolazione che attuano nei confronti di chi poi si trova a combattere sul campo di battaglia.

Quando gli eserciti si mettono in marcia le bandiere sventolano e gli slogan risuonano dovunque stai in guardia piccolo uomo perché le castagne al fuoco non sono le tue ma di qua More...

I'm not sure where this book stands with the youth of today. It was an old book when I first read it as a freshman in college way back in the '80's, and I did so with much reluctance. Surely, this read had its day--like the Socialist Movement that this author fashionably identified with in the era of FDR. Back then, my jaw dropped as I read and read, staying up half the night continuing to devour the pages. And only just recently did I re-visit that chilling pleasure of reading this breathless w More...

Johnny Got His Gun, by Dalton Trumbo is a pretty awesome book altho it could've been written a little better, I still enjoyed reading it. But I like his cause, this is an anti- war book published in 1939. The author Dalton Trumbo was apparently the most famous member of “the Hollywood 10”. He was a film writer during the Mccarthy era. This book also won a National book Award.
This book really got me thinking, is war really necessary? Why do we put ourselves in crazy situations that get us kille More...

In regards to this review there are two sections of my life, both very different from one another: the time before I had read this book, and the time since I have read this book. There has been no book so influential in my thinking, and my life as this one, and though it has become common-almost cliched-to say that a book is 'moving,' or that 'it will stay with you forever,' I can say that for me at least, this is indeed one of those books. The first time that I had read this novel I will never More...

Amazing indeed! I believe this to be an under-recognized text among my generation. For war to be such a distant thing for many of us living in the privileged North, reading a text like this can set you straight on understanding the potential pain an individual can experience from war.

Essentially, Trumbo's done a great job at articulating the experience of Joe so well, I was consistently drawn to the next page. A push, a push, a push towards seeing if his nigh-vegetable state could be worsened be More...

Reading books for class can be a drag. Often they can be boring, dry, and filled with things that teachers LOVE to analyze the hell out of.

Fortunately, Johnny Got His Gun was not one of those books. It's the sad and suffocating tale of a veteran who 'wakes up' in a hospital to discover he is in a very poor condition. I have never read a book that has given me as much anxiety as this book has. As Joe struggles with his state of being, frustration, paranoia, and lack of time and knowledge of wher More...

Like most of my generation, I became aware of this book and the film it inspired because of the use of clips in a Metallica video that was popular during my adolescence. Since then I've been curious about both the book and film, but never got around to watching or reading it.

I was surprised by this book, which turned out to be one of the best reads I've ever had. I was expecting something a bit stuffier and more old fashioned than what it is. Johnny Got His Gun is deeply and immediately engross More...

I read this book years ago. Back in the 70's. I'd barely missed Vietnam but did join the service voluntarily. A friend gave me this book.
It took a lot of guts to write the profoundly and emotionally descriptive story about the horror of war.
People come away from it with strong emotions. Not always the same. As a young man in my twenties, knowing guys that didn't come back from Vietnam and knowing a few who came back in body only, this book struck me hard. It helped me to understand the sacrifi More...

Sometimes honoring your country can be harmful and very dangerous. Many people enter the war willingly when they want to make a right and serve their country. Although today you have an option, during the Civil War there was a draft where people didn’t have a choice to join. The main character Johnny has a giant struggle throughout the book. During the war he was seriously injured and unfortunately lost a lot of privileges. These privileges aren’t items or freedom, but physical and mental privil More...

I decided to pick this book up after reading of it in Newman and Jones' excellent overview volume, "Horror: 100 Best Books." While the overwhelming majority of the books discussed therein deal with ghosts, the supernatural, werewolves, vampires and the like, Dalton Trumbo's "Johnny Got His Gun" (1939) deals with horror of a different sort: the horror of war, or, more specifically, war's aftermath.

In this unforgettable novel, we meet a young man named Joe Bonham, a normal guy from Colorado who h More...

This is an amazing book. It is almost an experiment in writing which ends up being a phenomenal piece of literature. It's almost like a creative writing assignment to write about a character with no nose, no mouth, no arms, no legs, no ears and no eyes.

There is one scene with a rat. I won't give too much away, but I'm not often bothered by graphic scenes in books. This scene had me squirming as it was so well written and so appropriate to the situation the character was in.

The whole book is stre More...