Review: Childhood's End
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Review: Anandamath
Anandamath by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay My rating: 3 of 5 stars View all my reviews
Review: Slaughterhouse 5: The Children's Crusade A Duty-Dance With Death
Slaughterhouse 5: The Children's Crusade A Duty-Dance With Death by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. My rating: 5 of 5 stars Billy Pilgrim is someone unstuck from time, and experiences it non-linearly, all the same time, travelling back and forth to his past and future, and is aware of all that has been and will be. He is indifferent to his actual life, with a successful career and family, and chooses to instead sleepwalk through it in daze of his past trauma. Billy was a soldier who fought in the second world war. But he and many of his compatriots were essentially infants playing at a ‘children’s crusade’. That war, much like those before, was planned and orchestrated by the whims of old men, who sent out inexperienced young men to die. Much like the 12th century monks who gathered impressionable orphans off the street, trained them to be soldiers, and sold them for wars to be fought far away in Africa. Or in the current day, a generic African warlord, who t