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<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4980.Breakfast_of_Champions?utm_medium=api&amp;utm_source=blog_review" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img alt="Breakfast of Champions" border="0" src="http://s3.amazonaws.com/photo.goodreads.com/books/1165517166m/4980.jpg" /></a> <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4980.Breakfast_of_Champions?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">Breakfast of Champions</a> by <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/998584.Kurt_Vonnegut">Kurt Vonnegut</a> 
 <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/21350474?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review"><h3>My review</h3></a>
 rating: 5 of 5 stars Best passages:
 
 I think I am trying to make my head as empty as it was when I was born onto this damaged planet fifty years ago.
 
 I suspect that this is something most white Americans, and nonwhite Americans who imitate white Americans, should do. The things other people hae put into my head, at any rate, do not fit together nicely, are offten useless and ugly, are out of proportion with one another, are out of proportion with life as it really is outside my head. I have no culture, no humane harmony in my brains. I can't live without a culture anymore.
 
 So this book is a sidewalk strewn with junk, trash which I throw over my shoulders as I travel in time back to November eleventh, nineteen hundred and twenty-two.
 
 I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. Whene I wasa boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent duringg the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.
 
 It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden. Silence was the voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.
 p 15.
 
 1492
 The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already livingg full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them. 
 p. 18
 
 Here was the core of bad ideas which Trout gave to Dwayne: Everybody on Earth was a robot, with one exception--Dwayne Hoover.
 
 Of all the creatures in the Universe, only Dwayne was thinking and feeling and worrying and planning and so on. Nobody else knew what pain was. Nobody else had any choices to make. Everybody else was a fully automatic machine, whose purposee was to stimulate Dwayne. Dwayne was a new type of creature being tested by the Creator of the Universe.
 Only Dwayne Hoover had free will.
 
 Trout did not expect to be believed. He put the bad ideas into a science-fiction novel, and that was where Dwayne found them. The book wasn't addressed to Dwayne alone. Trout had never heard of Dwayne when he wrote it. It was addressed to anybody, in effect, "Hey--gues what: You're the only create with free will. How does that make you feel? And so on.
 
 It was a tour de force. It was a jeu d'espirit.
 But it was mind poison to Dwayne.
 
 It shook up Trout to realize that even he could bring evil into the world--in the form of bad ideas. And, after Dwayne was carted off to a lunatic asylum in a canvas camisole, Trout became a fanatic on the importance of ideas as causes and cures for diseases. 
 
 But nobody would listen to him. He was a dirty old man in the wilderness, crying out among the trees and underbrush, "Ideas or the lack of them can cause disease!"
 Kilgore Trout became a pioneer in the field of mental health. He advanced his theories disguised as science-fiction. He died in 1981, almost 20 years after he made Dwayne Hoover so sick.
 
 He was then recognized as a great artist and scientist. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences caused a monument to be erected over his ashes. Carved in its face was a quotation from his last novel, his two-hundred-and-ninth novel, which was unfinished when he died. The monument looked like this:
 Kilgore Trout 1907-1981
 "We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane"
 p.23
 
 
 p172
 
 “I now give you my word of honor,” he went on, “that the picture your city owns shows everything about life which truly matters, with nothing left out. It is a picture of the awareness of every animal. It is the immaterial core of every animal—the “I am” to which all messages are sent. It is all that is alive in any of us—in a mouse, in a deer, in a cocktail waitress. It is unwavering and pure, no matter what preposterous adventure may befall us. A sacred picture of Saint Anthony alone is one vertical, unwavering band of light. If a cockroach were near him, or a cocktail waitress, the picture would show two such bands of light. Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery.”
 <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/321314?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">View all my reviews.</a>

Jeff's review
rating:
bookshelves: overdrive-library, sony-reader

Best passages:

I think I am trying to make my head as empty as it was when I was born onto this damaged planet fifty years ago.

I suspect that this is something most white Americans, and nonwhite Americans who imitate white Americans, should do. The things other people hae put into my head, at any rate, do not fit together nicely, are offten useless and ugly, are out of proportion with one another, are out of proportion with life as it really is outside my head. I have no culture, no humane harmony in my brains. I can't live without a culture anymore.

So this book is a sidewalk strewn with junk, trash which I throw over my shoulders as I travel in time back to November eleventh, nineteen hundred and twenty-two.

I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. Whene I wasa boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were sile...more

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