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Copy/paste the text below into your blog. <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/168668.Catch_22?utm_medium=api&amp;utm_source=blog_review" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img alt="Catch-22" border="0" src="http://s3.amazonaws.com/photo.goodreads.com/books/1172359810m/168668.jpg" /></a> <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/168668.Catch_22?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">Catch-22</a> by <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/3167.Joseph_Heller">Joseph Heller</a><br/><br/> <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/14598247?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review"><h3>My review</h3></a> rating: 5 of 5 stars<br/>Yossarian, a bombardier, is terrified that thousands of people he doesn't know are trying to kill him while he serves on the Italian front. It is also about those that victimize for the sake of power and status and those that are victimized. The book begins en medias res in the hospital with Yossarian and his cohorts, all healthy soldiers feigning sickness in order to avoid more military action. The book follows their hapless missions as they are used by Colonel Peckham in order to improve his chances for appearing on the cover of Life Magazine or becoming a general. On the way, you're treated to Miles Minderbinder's capitalist ventures that make the scalawags in the Civil War south look like saints, Major Major Major Major's disappearing acts, the chaplain's mistaken visions that help him retain his faith, and a healthy dosage of mysogeny (Heller is yet another talented wirter who really doesn't even attempt to understand women). <br/> <br/>Technically, there are so many things to admire in this book. The orderly sense of traditional chronology is disrupted to reflect the chaotic and highwire experiences of war. For one, a traditional chronological narrative is substituted by repetitive patterns: each chapter, again, titled by a different character, Yossarian at various stages of his attempts to depart the military, the soldier Snowden's moment and manner of death as Yossarian watched on, the number of missions the soldiers are told to complete before being discharged, and catch-22 itself. The characters are stylized, exaggerated versions of people. The sweetspot between the everyman and the individual, as Charlie D'Ambrosio put it. The pace is manic but also slow when it needs to be. The comic tone never diminishes the anger of the book ("Men went mad and were rewarded with medals", "There was a much lower death rate inside the hospital than outside the hospital"), but rather, as Wilhelm Barnhardt roughly put it, the tone and the material are at odds with each other, which, in my opinion, creates friction, or energy, between the tone and content of Catch-22. <br/> <br/>But most of all, it's an important, angry, felt book, that does all of this not by lecturing, but by entertaining in a language that feels invented by Heller. This writing is audacious, daring, not carefully literary and lifeless like so many hailed writers--Heller does not know how to write an uninteresting sentence. Dialogue rarely gets this strange or this good, the political and social issues of modern man rarely gets so depicted so humorously or accurately. It's my second reading of this novel, and it's stunned me as much as it had the first time. <br/><br/><a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/733929?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">View all my reviews.</a>