Galapagos: A Novel

by Kurt Vonnegut

Paperback, 1999

Status

Available

Call number

813.54

Collection

Publication

Dial Press Trade Paperback (2006), Edition: Reissue, Paperback, 324 pages

Description

Galapagos takes the listener back one million years. A simple vacation cruise suddenly becomes an evolutionary journey. Thanks to an apocalypse, a small group of survivors stranded on the Galapagos Islands are about to become the progenitors of a brave, new, totally different human race. Kurt Vonnegut, America's master satirist, looks at our world and shows us all that is sadly, madly awry--and all that is worth saving.

User reviews

LibraryThing member snat
As a fan of sarcasm, cynicism, pessimism, and nihilism (yup, I'm fun at parties), as well as an absurdist plot, I'm a smitten-kitten when it comes to Vonnegut. However, I'm not in love with Galapagos. In deep like? Yes, but, for me, the gold standard when it comes to Vonnegut is Cat's Cradle,
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followed by Mother Night. I did, however, like Galapagos better than Slaughterhouse-Five.

Galapagos is set one million years after 1986, when the world as we know it ended and, through a series of fluke events, one man and several women are stranded on the island of Santa Rosalia in the Galapagos. The end of civilization was brought about by mankind's "big brains" (although not necessarily by man himself, as man is fundamentally good--just led astray by his inability to control his thoughts and his imagination), along with the help of a bacteria that leaves all the women of the world sterile. However, on the secluded island of Santa Rosalia, the female castaways still young enough to produce are spared and, with an unwilling sire and a little help from a high school biology teacher, they are all impregnated. Thus, life continues to flourish on Santa Rosalia. Not only that, but after millions of years, mankind has evolved so that they have smaller brains, flippers for hands, and a lifespan of 30 years (at which point we're easy prey for sharks and killer whales). Welcome to utopia! With our Darwinian advancements, we no longer have the ability to lie, cheat, steal, etc. We also lack the capacity for simple thought or creativity of any kind. (Admittedly, it's a shit utopia, as far as utopias go, and I would gladly swim out to meet the sharks myself.)

If you think I've just divulged several plot spoilers, I haven't. You learn all this at the beginning of the novel and the rest of the novel circles itself like a dog chasing its tail as these events are told over and over again, but with additional details added with each retelling. This structure could become somewhat repetitive for some readers, but didn't really bother me. As with most Vonnegut novels, fragmented and nonlinear narrative is to be expected, as is the theme of "people are dumbasses." However, there is hope in the novel as it serves as a cautionary tale--if we learn to rein in our big brains, then maybe we'll be spared the evolutionary chain of events that leads to the utopian existence of lounging around on a beach somewhere, clapping our flippers together while while chewing seaweed cud and hoping for some seal-like lovin' before the sharks come for us. And I think that's a lesson we can all learn from, don't you?
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LibraryThing member Atomicmutant
Interesting, madcap comic take on the hubris of our species. All about the "end of the world" as brought upon ourselves by our "big-brained-ness", and the patient, ever-present forces of evolution inexorably driving our species to a different conclusion than we could ever have anticipated. A great
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satirical work, and the only one I've read to make a great case for losing that ever-popular opposable thumb as a means to perpetuate the species.

Vonnegut has really familiarized himself well with the principles of natural selection and so humbles us in the face of this overpowering principle.

Wacky scientific insight, and his usual mordant wit make for a strange ride.......
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LibraryThing member EmScape
In this cautionary tale, Kurt Vonnegut tries to point out that a lot of mankind's problems would be solved if we didn't have such excessively large brains. Apparently, animals have the right idea, just eating and screwing and surviving their way through life. I disagree with this premise, because
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my large brain is essentially what allows me to read books by Kurt Vonnegut.
In order to hammer home his theory, Vonnegut has the ghost of Kilgore Trout's son Leon tell us about "The Nature Cruise of the Century" upon which many celebrities are supposed to travel to the Galapagos Islands. He does not tell the tale in a linear format, rather mentioning extremely important bits of information (what one might call spoilers if I were to mention them in this review) right at the very beginning, and then sort of filling in the details as we go along. His narrator is also very conversational in his first-person account of the events. He frequently divulges things in an aside that one might think are completely irrelevant, but turn out to be quite germane later on. Vonnegut is the inventor of the puzzle-book format, paving the way for those like Danielewski and Eichner, and he proves it with this work.
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LibraryThing member messpots
This book was sent to me by a relative, not to read, but as a container for an envelope of seeds: my relative wanted to ensure the continuity of one of her grandmother's plants. When I actually read the book, I laughed long and hard about how I got it. I read the book because Martin Amis had
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written such a complimentary review of it (republished in The War against Cliche) and called it Vonnegut's best work since Slaughterhouse Five. The theme of the book, most briefly, is the outsized brains of humans, brains which make the humans ill adapted to the earth and themselves collectively, and ultimately cause humans to disappear, causing also lots of mischief on the way. The theme is developed within an extended joke, that the last surviving humans end up on the Galapagos Islands, famously studied by Darwin. This gives the narrator of the book's events the chance to play the role of a latter-day Darwin.
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LibraryThing member DirtPriest
I really enjoy the sarcasm of Vonnegut. Maybe others don't, but If you like it it's the best stuff. In Galapagos, Vonnegut narrates as a ghost recapping events in 1986 AD from the vantage point of one million years in the future. Of course, there is a World War III and the only remnants of humanity
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are the descendants of a small group of survivors of an ill-fated 'Nature Cruise of the Century' to the Galapagos. Vonnegut cuts to the core of human frailty and that of his institutions as the world finances fall apart, leading to food riots and war. Those damn big brains humans used to have! So easy to be befuddled by mysteries... Evolution theory plays a minor role here as humankind has become more streamlined and smaller brained, the better for catching fish, with nothing for tools but teeth and flippers after a million years on the Galapagos Islands, but the bulk of the story is about 1986 AD, one million years ago, and it is told in the author's classic time-is-irrelevant-to-the-narrative style, doing things like putting an asterisk before names of people who will not survive the day, moving way ahead of the story-time by jumping ahead and inserting lines like, 'She would live to the ripe old age of 85, when she was eaten by a great white shark', while describing a scene when the character is in her 40's. If you've read Vonnegut then you know what I mean.
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LibraryThing member unclebob53703
I read a lot of his stuff back when I was in college (in a previous century) and saw this book on a list of post-apocalypse novels, which I am collecting. It was more or less what I expected, sad, funny, very much in the style I remembered. His thesis here is that our species big brains are an
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evolutionary disadvantage, and the book follows this to a conclusion that is at once bizarre and entirely sensible. There are even a couple beloved old characters of his tossed in for good measure. Very happy I got this
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LibraryThing member Sean191
Vonnegut is well known for his wit and humor. I think I didn't agree with that fame until I read Galapagos. Vonnegut's habit of giving away the story before he actually gets around to telling parts of it actually was brilliant in this case. Overall, very funny and a bit of a trip.
LibraryThing member kwohlrob
I don't think this is one of Vonnegut's best novels, but that would be splitting hairs -- like trying to compare Scorcese's "After Hours" to "Raging Bull." This book is still a brilliant piece of satire. I love the concept of him putting a star next to the names of the characters who were going to
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die.
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LibraryThing member shawnd
This is a peppy science fiction book of sorts by Vonnegut. His narrator, a ghost, discusses the history, antecedents, trials and travails of the last seven humans to escape dying on earth, as they travel to the Galapagos Islands. As the ghost has been forced to live one million years into the
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'future', he tells the tale at the end of this time, with the knowledge of the outcome of the 'end of the world' that wasn't, one million years before.

Using a metaphor of humans having much bigger brains than the 1 million year later inhabitants, Vonnegut provides a social critique of everything from alcohol to lying to many other human behaviors causing misery and pain in our contemporary world. The book is a fast read, and while fantastical, doesn't go overboard.
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LibraryThing member dczapka
An excellent book, up there among Vonnegut's best.

It's not quite what you expect from reading the back cover, but it tells such a detailed, deep, and interesting study of its characters that it becomes hard to put down since you get so invested in them.

That he uses the strength of this connection
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in a book that slaughters most every foible of human nature -- and does so with his trademark heartfelt voice -- is nothing short of brilliant.

Highly recommended.
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LibraryThing member Alera
I don't particularly care for Vonnegut's writing, but I find myself continually dragged back to his works. There is something so refreshing and irritating about his style that I just cannot help myself. This novel was no different. In a flash-back, -around, -upside down, and then back to the
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present, a story is told from an omniscient narrator, who died well over a million years before. He details how the last survivors of the human race, came together in Ecuador, ended up on a boat, and finally landed on an island in the Galapagos. In a very Darwinian fashion, in the very place Darwin pieced together what would later become 'Origin of Species', humankind evolves itself into something that finally lives up to Anne Frank's immortal words in the epigraph, "good at heart."
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LibraryThing member nursejane
This was a fun read. Vonnegut's creativity surprises me over and over again.

Galapagos feels more in the vein of Cat's Cradle (sci-fi-y) than Breakfast of Champions, for example, though the usual Midland City suspects definitely make cameos.
LibraryThing member booksbooks11
Like the best science fiction it has so many interesting ideas explored and tantalised through a compelling story line. I wonder about Vonnegut's mental state while writing this, it is just so black and dark, did he try to take the black view of humanity to such an extreme to show it's folly or
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it's fact? I'm not sure which. Just so right to see the birthplace of evolutionary theory as the deathplace of humanity by that very action.
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LibraryThing member laurenbethy
Awesomely weird and a little creepy and definitely competing with Cat's Cradle for my favorite slot out of Kurt Vonnegut's novels. At this point in time this novel is winning because of its out of this world crazy ideas about humankind and the direction we are going in. I think the reason I like
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this book so much is because of the seal people, but Vonnegut obviously never thought of test tube babies.
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LibraryThing member BooksForDinner
KV at his best. All the world infertile, a fictional island in the Galapagos one million years in the past (1986 of course), and the ghost of the son of Kilgore Trout.
LibraryThing member jmoncton
Read this book while in the Galapagos - pure Vonnegut - odd, quirky, laugh-at-loud funny.
LibraryThing member weeksj10
In this wondrously funny and enlightening book Vonnegut gives a simple explanation for all the troubles of humanity: our brains are too big to be practical. The solution? Evolve smaller, more "streamline" brains.
Read this book; it is one of the best books of one of the best authors that this
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overcrowded, sick, dying planet has to offer. I would also like to note that although Vonnegut does have a sense of dark humor and his satirical novels often poke fun at the direction of humanity, he also gives us a hopeful message for the future of human kind, although these messages are often delivered in a backhanded, disguised manner.
Simply wonderful, thought-provoking, and inspiring.
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LibraryThing member mesalamb
I read this right after Cat's Cradle, and I think I liked Galapagos better. Vonnegut has a very strange sense of chronology. He tells the end in the beginning and waits until the end to tell the beginning. It was good though for someone like me who is always rushing through to find out what happens
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in the end. There was no need to rush because I already knew who would die and what would become of the survivors. I could just enjoy the story. I thought the last few pages were kind of odd and the story could have been complete without them. Its like he has to throw a Vietnam reference in every book to prove a point or something, but I thought it took attention away from the story at hand.
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LibraryThing member tro214
One of the greatest books ever written!
LibraryThing member jimnightshade
i feel like its just a lesser version of Breakfast Of Champions, but i loved B.O.C., so i can still give this one a 3.5
LibraryThing member 5hrdrive
Vonnegut at the top of his game. All the humor, satire and scathing social commentary that we've come to expect is here - along with a great story. And the narrator is a ghost from one million years in the future... who else could come up with an idea like that?
LibraryThing member browner56
I suppose that I should start by saying that this is among the saddest reviews that I have ever written. Throughout my high school and college years, Kurt Vonnegut was one of my literary heroes. I voraciously consumed everything he wrote and spent countless hours discussing his clever wordplay and
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the intricacies of his ideas (or at least my perceptions of those ideas) with all of my friends who were similarly smitten. However, like most love affairs from that time in one’s life, the ardor soon cooled and I had stopped reading the author’s work altogether before he published Galapagos. Indeed, it was only when I was on the verge of my own trip to the Galapagos Islands some 25 years later that I decided to read the novel. Whether driven by nostalgia for the past or a simple attempt to pair my passions for travel and literature, it was a decision that did not end as well as I had hoped.

I suspect that Vonnegut intended this to be work of meta-fiction: a straightforward science fiction story wrapped inside of an Important Message about the foibles of human nature. However, Galapagos fails badly in both respects. The plot involves a ghost from a million years in the future—the son of Kilgore Trout, for fans of the author—who observes the ill-fated outcome of a much-ballyhooed “Nature Cruise of the Century” from the Ecuadorian port city of Guayaquil to the Galapagos Islands where Charles Darwin first began his ruminations on what would become the theory of Natural Selection. This is truly thin stuff that is simply uninteresting and, worse, poorly conceived. In fact, the only purpose the narrative seems to serve is to promote the author’s main argument that the “big brains” humans possessed in the late-20th century were the source of all of the world’s problems and that mankind could not survive until it evolved into a simpler life form. However, such a tired argument holds little substance, which does not stop the author from repeating it scores of times throughout the book.

I wish that I had read this novel when it was first published in 1985 for two reasons. First, reading it more than a quarter-century later, the book felt hopelessly dated with its integral references to celebrities such as Jackie Kennedy Onassis and Johnny Carson whose stars have long since faded. Of course, as Jane Austen and Gustave Flaubert have proven, it is possible to write stories that still seem fresh today despite the words on the page being centuries old; unfortunately, Vonnegut’s work does not stand the test of time in that way. Second, I really wonder if I would have found Galapagos to be compelling—or even liked it at all—if I had read it back when it may have seemed new and insightful. Sadly, given its simplistic, heavy-handed message and repetitive use of foreshadowing, I suspect that the answer to that question is “no”. Reading this novel, then, was ultimately just a reminder that the ship of fiction that Vonnegut guided sailed away for me a long time ago.
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LibraryThing member krazy4katz
What should I say? Not my favorite Vonnegut, but Vonnegut is one of my favorite authors. A fascinating premise -- that we are not finished evolving and that we may be in for a redo in the next millennium due to the inability of our big brains to protect our bodies from killing ourselves off. In
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fact, our big brains may be the biggest problem for the entire earth. Darwinian to the core but taking a longer view. Humorous, ironic, twisted, as always.
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LibraryThing member kirstiecat
I've seen some well deserved ratings for many of Vonnegut's other books but oddly enough not this one and it's definitely one of my favorites.

I hadn't read this book since 2003 and this was my third time, after the last of the giant tortoises on Galapagos died so recently I felt I needed to have
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this re0visit with Vonnegut, who was much like the giant tortoise at the end I think..strange wonderful and one of a kind and when Vonnegut became extinct, it was just as much a loss to the world. A re-occurring theme in Galapagos (instead of the So it Goes saying that frequently invades the writing style of many of his others) is a yet similar sentiment when a human being dies that well this human being wasn't going to compose Beethoven's Ninth Symphony anyways. But Vonnegut did far greater things than Beethoven did for people like me. He was a philosopher who forever sensed the tragicomedy of the past, present, and future, and even more wondrous was able to share all his notions and ideas with the rest of the planet. Vonnegut gave us many gifts. They are gifts to enrich and pass along to others just as they are gifts to help increase our sense of insight into the world and to humanity.

Vonnegut, if you are a ghost who, like our storyteller of Galapagos, has chosen to exist for a million years before venturing into the blue afterlife tunnel, I hope you sense your value on this planet and how much you are missed by people like me.

Getting more specific to the novel, there is a clear sense of Vonnegut exploring ideas of evolution and possibilities of war and nuclear radiation factoring into all that...and, for most of the novel the ghost of the protagonist (who is also the son of Kilgore Trout, an often appearing character in some of Vonnegut's other novels), seems to think it's just fine that human beings evolved into furry seal like creatures with fins instead of hands, smaller brains, and much shorter lifespans (and therefore able to avoid all of the pain of so many genetic diseases such as Huntington's and also diseases of aging such as Alzheimer's.) Yet, it's obvious Vonnegut sees avoiding all this pain and agony also leads to the sacrifice of great art, music, and literature. It's just too bad humans typically prefer to build weapons to kill each other instead of all that, of course.


It's always a delight to see some reappearing characters like Kilgore Trout mentioned as well, even though he's not the center of the story by any means. In many ways, I've always thought one must re-read all of Vonnegut's novels again and again throughout life because they all make sense as one grand intersecting story in a way that enhances them. In other words, one cannot sense the same kind of greatness reading them singularly. They are all like great friends on Vonnegut's journey through life and understanding the adventures of all of his characters simultaneously seems key to fully comprehending Vonnegut's meaning and perhaps his own rich journey.

Truly, though this book takes place in 1986, Vonnegut's ideas about humans as they are having the capacity to act on destroying each other and what that would lead to as well as looking at the trends then now that still exist today such as food scarcity and extreme classism are very relevant. Take heed! Because, as Vonnegut talks about all of the easiness of humans evolving into smaller brained creatures who care more about their own survival than any other high concepts, he is simultaneously revisiting all of humanity's best words on all sorts of topics. It is so clear there is a loss to be had even if our big brains are diabolocal.


As in many Vonnegut novels, this will make you question, search, laugh, and cry quite a bit. It's written in more of a matter of fact kind of narrative-like it or not, this is how humans died and how others evolved but I believe Vonnegut was a deep feeling person and for as many times that he wrote the words "So it Goes" throughout his life, he was able to despair in humanity's pitfalls because he was able to sense them so deeply within his own life's experiences. I do believe Vonnegut also took joy in the idea of random luck, too, and the utter absurdity of luck sometimes. Thank goodness Vonnegut didn't perish in war. Thankfully, he led a very long life. He was no Beethoven...he was something better, something richer, something fully evolved.


Favorite quotes:

pg. 25 "To the credit of humanity as it used to be: More and more people were saying that their brains were irresponsible, unreliably, hideously dangerous, wholly unrealistic,-were simply no damn good."

pg. 29 "If I may insert a personal note at this point: When I was alive, I often received advice from my own big brain which, in terms of m own survival, or the survival of the human race, for that matter, can be charitably described as questionable. Example: It had me join the United States Marines and go fight in Vietnam.

Thanks a lot, big brain."

pg. 98 "In the era of big brains, life stories could end up any which way. Look at mine."

pg. 129 "This was a particularly tragic flaw a million years ago, since the people who were best informed about the state of the planet, like *Andrew MacIntosh, for example, and rich and powerful enough to slow down all the waste and destruction going on, were by definition well fed.

So everything was always just fine as far as they were concerned.

For all the computers and measuring instruments and news gatherers and evaluators and memory banks and libraries and experts on this and that at their disposal, their deaf and blind bellies remained the final judges of how urgent this or that problem, such as the destruction of North America's and Europe's forests by acid rain, say might really be."


pg. 187 "His name was Guillermo Reyes, and he was able to survive at such an altitude because his suit and helmet were inflated with an artificial atmosphere. People use to be so marvelous, making impossible dreams they made come true."


pg. 233 "Human beings were so prolific back then that conventional explosions like that had few if any long term biological consequences. Even at the end of protracted wars, there still seemed to be plenty of people around. Babies were always so plentiful that serious efforts to reduce the population by means of violence were doomed to failure. They no more left permanent injuries except for the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, then did Bahia de Darwin as it slit and roiled the trackless sea.

It was humanity's ability to heal so quickly. by means of babies, which encouraged so many people to think of explosions as show business, as highly theatrical forms of self expression, and little more.

What humanity was about to lose, though, except for one tiny colony on Santa Roaslia, was what the trackless sea could never lose, so long as it was made of water: the ability to heal itself.

As far as humanity was concerned, all wounds were about to become very permanent. And high explosives weren't going to be a branch of show business anymore."

pg. 259 "Nothing ever happens here anymore that I haven't seen or heard so many times before. Nobody, surely, is going to write Beethoven's Ninth Symphony-or tell a lie, or start a Third World War.

Mother was right: Even in the darkest times, there really was still hope for humankind."

pg. 266 "That, in my opinion, was the most diabolical aspect of those old-time big brains: They would tell their owners, in effect, 'Here is a crazy thing we could actually do, probably, but we would never do it, of course. It's just there to think about.'

And then, as though in trances, the people would really do it-have slaves fight each other to the death in the Colosseum, or burn people alive in the public square for holding opinions which were locally unpopular, or build factories whose only purpose was to kill people in industrial quantities, or to blue up whole cities, and on and on."

pg. 270 "And why was quiet desperation such a widespread malady back then, and especially among men? Yet again I trot onstage the only real villain in my story: the oversize human brain.

Nobody leads a life of quiet desperation nowadays. The mass of men was quietly desperate a million years ago because the infernal computers inside their skills were incapable of restraint or idleness; were forever demanding more challenging problems which life could not provide."

pg. 289 "This animal had its eyes on the ends of stalks, a design perfected by the Law of Natural Selection many, many millions of years ago. It was a flawless part in the clockwork of the universe. There was no defect in it which might yet need to be modified. One thing it surely did not need was a bigger brain.

What was it going to do with a bigger brain? Compose Beethoven's Ninth Symphony?

Or perhaps write these lines:

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players/
They have their exists and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many
parts.....?

(William Shakespeare (1564-1616)



pg. 292 "Do people still know they are going to die sooner or later? No. Fortunately, in my humble opinion, they have forgotten that."

pg. 294-295 "But that Swede foud something to say which made me cry like a baby-at last, at last. He was as surprised as I was when I cried and cried.

Here is what he said: 'I notice your name is Trout. Is there any chance you are related to the wonderful science fiction writer, Kilgore Trout?'
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LibraryThing member petrojoh
Vonnegut asks us if having such "big brains" is is an evolutionary benefit or a hindrance.

Awards

Audie Award (Finalist — Classic — 2009)

Language

Original publication date

1985

Physical description

336 p.; 8.05 inches

ISBN

0385333870 / 9780385333870
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