Customer Reviews

Love as Always, Kurt: Vonnegut as I Knew Him

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

For me, the best parts of this book occur in the first couple of chapters where we get a glimpse of a struggling, unknown Vonnegut teaching and writing at the Iowa Writer's Workshop in the mid-sixties. Very little information about Vonnegut's life before Slaughterhouse Five is available, and the first couple of chapters provide some insight. But Racksaw works close to the vest when it comes to details about any kind of sexual affair, only hinting most of the time. And she focuses much more on the mood and feel of the Workshop community than the actualy day to day classes and what Vonnegut was like as a teacher. She gives us glimpses, but that's about all.

The rest of the book conicles Vonnegut's rise to fame up and continuing struggles with depression and writing until his death in 2007, mostly through Rackstraw's memories and correspondence with Vonnegut. She keeps Vonnegut in the forefront at all times and never tries to grab the spotlight, which is a good thing.

But I wouldn't call this a very fair and balanced portrayal. Kurt is all good in her eyes, never writing a bad book, never giving a bad speech, never drawing a bad picture. I imagine Vonnegut, prone to mood swings and depression, was probably pretty hard to get along with at times. And yes, he wrote a few bad books too.

Still, until a definitive Vonnegut biography comes out, something like this is a nice look inside the life of one of American literature's most popular figures.

I have read Kurt Vonnegut over the years and re-read most of his novels after his death in 2007. It is great to have the backgrounds of some of these books and to see another side of him.

I didn't know about this lady and I don't care to read the intimate details of their relationship. She tosses out enough hints where I can use my imagination and that is how it should be. I am approximately her age and understand where she is coming from. Most of us brought up in Iowa when she was (I was too) learned to keep private things private.

I recommend this book to any Vonnegut fans who want to read how it all was done. I am now on a quest to find copies of the speeches, articles and essays she mentioned!

I bought this book being a Vonnegut fan, wanting to know more about his life. Rackstraw's book gave me a start at least. It's about a long distance friendship that spanned most of Vonnegut's life as a writer, and it did't seem to me the author was capitalizing on that friendship for money or fame. At times Rackstraw let's her emotions show. There was more to their relationship than just teacher and student, or being fellow writers, so why not open a vein or two. To me the book overall was more objective than subjective, and is a good, quick look at the real Kurt Vonnegut, until a comprehensive biography comes along. Recommended.

In Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut described that as an Anthropology student at the University of Chicago he was taught "nobody was ridiculous or bad or disgusting. Shortly before my father died, he said to me, 'You know -- you never wrote a story with a villain in it.' It is appropriate that in Lorre Rackstraw's book on Vonnegut there are also no villains just a number of people trying to make their way as writers and other artists in this world.

The book focuses on the creative milieu that Vonnegut worked in during his teaching at the Iowa Writers Workshop, and his life in Massachusetts and New York. From it we have some idea of Vonnegut's relationships with Rackstraw, his two wives Jane Vonnegut and Jill Krementz, his children and his family. More interesting, to me at least, was the book's reminiscences of Vonnegut's relationships with other writers and artists like Andre Dubus, Paul Engle, Joseph Heller, John Irving, Richard Yates and others. I think Rackstraw does as excellent job describing the group dynamic of the authors that Vonnegut befriended and admired and the book gives a great sense of them as a whole. Even though her discussion of her own relationship is at times constrained, she does provide some insight into the development of his creative works. It is a tribute to her that Vonnegut trusted her review and opinions of them.

This is not a biography and not a definitive work on Vonnegut but future historians and biographers are greatly in her debt.

This book is subtitled "Vonnegut as I Knew Him," but I think a better choice would be "Tales of a Desperate Hanger-On." Loree Rackstraw is determined to make herself seem like one of THE most important people in Kurt Vonnegut's life. At one point, she actually goes so far as to claim she was one of the first two people (ever) to recognize the author's true genius. She includes plenty of excerpts from their correspondence, all of which coincidentally seem to be about how talented and brilliant she is, and how much Vonnegut loves and admires her.

It seemed like I was rolling my eyes at every other page with statements such as "My contribution was a consciously subtle expression of gratitude and affection for [Vonnegut's] invention of harmless untruths that helped us all endure."

I got about halfway through this book before giving up, which was being really generous. I like to think that Vonnegut, who seems never to have taken himself too seriously, would have found this book cringeworthy at best.

If you are a Vonnegut fan looking for insights into this brilliant author's character, I recommend looking elsewhere. Loree Rackstraw's ego trip is a sad attempt to profit from Kurt Vonnegut's memory.

As a Vonnegut fan who was looking for a little more background on the man, I couldn't help but pick this up (for about $7 from an Amazon seller). I got what I paid for.

This book is not great. It will not put Vonnegut's writings in a whole new light or give you a more profound understanding of the man or his works. What it does is provide 200+ pages of mostly interesting personal background to what was going on in his life at the time he was writing many of his greatest works. The book is generally well-written, and despite the criticism from other reviewers, this is not a tell all of some affair he had or a personal story of the author.

The book provides background, context to some of the personal issues that may have driven Vonnegut's writing. If you can pick it up for a few bucks, it is well worth the read.

I struggled to slosh through this uninspired kiss-and-barely-tell memoir, hoping to catch a glimpse into the psyche of one of our true eccentric geniuses - or at least get a hint about his sexual side. Instead, I got a portrait of a man about as uninteresting and asexual as my Uncle John at Thanksgiving dinner. Why was Ms. Rackstraw unable to capture any of the vivacity of this alluring author and lecturer? Was it that one-sided a love affair?
In "The People One Knows," an autobiographical essay in Palm Sunday, Mr. Vonnegut lists in alphabetical order the hundreds of writers who were his friends. Why does the name, Loree Rackstraw, a published writer by 1981, not appear between
V.S. Pritchett and Dotson Rader? Was she too trivial a player in his life? Or was Mr. Vonnegut simply too embarrassed to include a former mistress?
If I had been lucky enough to have the attention of a gorgeous, affable, albeit married professor, later to become globally famous, I am afraid by now everyone would know about it. In detail. No holds barred. For hopefully my tiny piece of the Vonnegut puzzle might illuminate a bit of what made this elusive man tick,

This is book is rather boring and comes across as a simple attempt to profit from a relationship and nothing more. I wanted to learn about Kurt Vonnegut and not her or her fling with the author.