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Johnny Got His Gun
Johnny Got His Gun
Johnny Got His Gun
Audiobook7 hours

Johnny Got His Gun

Written by Dalton Trumbo

Narrated by William Dufris

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

4.5/5

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About this audiobook

This was no ordinary war. This was a war to make the world safe for democracy. And if democracy was made safe, then nothing else mattered-not the millions of dead bodies, nor the thousands of ruined lives.... This is no ordinary novel. This is a novel that never takes the easy way out: it is shocking, violent, terrifying, horrible, uncompromising, brutal, remorseless, and gruesome...but so is war.

Johnny Got His Gun holds a place as one of the classic antiwar novels. First published in 1939, Dalton Trumbo's story of a young American soldier terribly maimed in World War I-he "survives" armless, legless, and faceless, but with his mind intact-was an immediate bestseller. This fiercely moving novel was a rallying point for many Americans who came of age during World War II, and it became perhaps the most popular novel of protest during the Vietnam era.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateApr 21, 2008
ISBN9781400176557

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Reviews for Johnny Got His Gun

Rating: 4.560975609756097 out of 5 stars
4.5/5

82 ratings36 reviews

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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Gives a great insight on what war is all about.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I had not gotten around to reading this classic. i knew it would be powerful and intense and avoided it for lighter reads. Finally read the Kindle version and it had a profound effect on me. Beautifully written with a feel of Steinbeck. Excellent imagery and character development. Compelling pace.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    If you agree with the thinking of the Sheehans you will love this book. Also at the time it was written I can see how it would make a great impact on the country. It is very descriptive and you are right there with him but just not my style.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    One of the most powerful anti-war books I have ever read.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    “Now I lay me down to sleep my bomb proof cellar's good and deep but if i'm killed before I wake remember god it's for your sake amen.” Wow, what can I say about this book? Thought provoking? Yep. Harrowing? Yep. Disturbing? Yep. Intriguing? Oh yeah and then some.This book features a young man Joe Bonham, conscripted to fight in the trenches of WWI only to be horrifically injured in a shell blast. Joe wakes up initially to find that he is deaf but then realises that his injuries stretch much farther than that as it turns out that he has lost all his senses bar one, thought, so he finds himself trapped with only his thoughts and memories for company. Now this book is seen as anti-war and is certainly that with tales of conscripts sent to fight others' battles but this book is more than that, it is also about being part of a larger humanity and what happens to us if we are cut off from it. A desperation to belong.Many people will argue that this book is now out-dated and as most countries no longer have conscription they are right to a certain point but the fact is even today whilst most armies are made up of volunteers and professionals, wars are still fought by the little people not by the elite. What has changed is that modern warfare means that weapons are able to be fired at vast distances at largely unseen enemies but the fact remains that there is still someone on the receiving end of them likely to be killed, injured or their lives irrevocably changed forever usually detrimentally. The fact is that medical advances means that more and more people are surviving and living with horrific injuries than ever before as can be witnessed whenever we put on our TVs. In that way this book is stiil as relevant now as when it was first published,in 1939.This book also challenges many of the norms we ascribe to in a so called civilised society that are too complex to go into in any great detail. However, there are also some very subtle touches of comedy which periodically lift the gloomAn interesting thing to note, and I feel that this is a touch of genius by Trumbo, is that throughout the book there is no punctuation other than full stops. This means that the book reads as a single stream of thought. Now this was not at first initially obvious to me but as I got further and further into the book this struck me as a brilliant ploy.Go out and read this book. Whether you enjoy or hate it I almost guarantee that it will at least get you thinking about just what it means to be 'human'.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    take a deep breath before you reag this book. Enjoy life the way you see it, feel it, hear it , live it because it will all change. This is horrific, fuck hollywood horror movies, you wanna be scared read this book.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Although the time in the novel is 1918, it could have been happening anywhere, anytime. It is truly tragic and honest and open and curious and brave, and very very sad, of course. We people do strange things, and one of the strangest and the most horrible ones are the wars, which are, literally, as necessary as a hole in one's head. This book is an outcry of pain and suffering, and the fact that the character cannot even perform this outcry mirrors the terrible logic of the war. His helplessness, and his lost future are caused by things and people he has nothng to do with and the realisation of this non-sense is almost even more painful than suffering caused by his actual wounds. As so often, I would suggest this book to be read at schools, as a part of ethics or similar classes.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    One of the more awesome books I've ever read.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A Powerful Anti-War Novel.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This was a very good book. A lot of it was very painful to read. I loved Johnny's reflections on war and the things soldiers are asked to die for in war. I really liked the idea of how you can never ask a dead soldier if it was worth dying for. It's hard to say much about the book, but I would definitely recommend it to everyone. It's a quick read.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A sad, poignant anti-war novel like no other, it is also one of the most powerful. The movie is pretty good too. Responsible for getting Dalton Trumbo put on the black list during the McCarthy era.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    It takes a while to get used to the stream of conciousness style of the book, but once you do, it flows quite well.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is one of the most powerful books I have read in a long time. It is the ultimate in indictment of war as it affects the common draftee. Having just finished the audio version of Trumbo by Bruce Cook, I decided that Johnny was a book I could not and should not miss. Well written, it deals with one of the most horrible aspects of war that you can possibly imagine. To say that I enjoyed it is not accurate in the least. This is not a book to be enjoyed. But it is a story that needs to be told over and over again and to anyone and everyone who will listen or read. It is horrifying and touching and nostalgic and claustrophobic and sad beyond measure and enraging. And it is a timeless message.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This is a heavy anti-war novel written through the mind of a man who lost both legs, both arms, the ability to see or speak because he was injured during a war. This book speaks volumes about war and it is one of the popular books during the Vietnam-era and is definitely relevant now. It is not a long read, nor is it too difficult to understand. I highly recommend it.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This book was so gut-wrenching to read. I had to take a break a few times in order to continue.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Trumbo was blacklisted as a writer because of his anti-war leanings; reading this, it's amazing how far civilisation has come in the last fifty years, and simultaneously we haven't budged an inch."Johnny" is a terribly sad tale of a boy sent off to war, who comes home mangled and destroyed, blind, deaf, a remnant of a human being. When he finally learns how to communicate with those around him, it transpires that what he most wants to say, nobody wants to hear. Extremely sad.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    One of the most powerful books I have read about World War I.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is a powerful, gut wrenching tale.

    Johnny is a boy who went to war...and got wounded. We meet him in the hospital, where we expect him to be safely recovering. I will not give away the reality that Dalton Trumbo gradually reveals to the reader. I will only tell you that Stephen King, the master of 'make it worse', could learn a thing or two from Trumbo.

    Be sure you have a good supply of Kleenex.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Having watched first hand as my brother tried to recover his life after serving in Vietnam, this book solidified my opinions towards using men simply as fodder for cannons. This book still haunts me today.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This is a story about the ravenges of war. Not so much the acts of war, but more the damage war does to the human soul. The story is about a man trapped in his own mind after fighting in WWI, and the trauma it has on his sanity. The book was ok, it was a bit on the depressing side, the entire story line was the main character's stream of conciousness which I personally found a bit tedious and wanted more background information, either as an introduction or a epilogue.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This book is spectacular. Not once did I pick up the book and put it down without crying in between. This should be required reading for anyone considering joining the military: if it doesn't happen to you, you might make it happen for someone else. War is unimaginable hell.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    One of my 5 modern anti-war classics. Simply amazing. Every time I read it, it leaves me stunned. They made a movie based on it, and Metallica based the song 'One' on the film.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    At the end of Johnny Got His Gun there is a fantastic line uttered by the protagonist that sums up the entire experience of reading the novel:“That would be a great thing to concentrate war in one stump of a body and to show it to people so they could see the difference between a war that’s in newspaper headlines and liberty loan drives and a war that is fought lonesomely in the mud somewhere a war between a man and a high explosive shell.”Dalton Trumbo’s greatest triumph with Johnny Got His Gun was boiling the entire anti-war argument of the novel into that single horror: an armless, legless, faceless, eyeless, voiceless casualty screaming at you for mercy. If you favor military action in any form, can you justify the victories in the loss of life and limbs?Needless to say, Johnny Got His Gun still resonates so effectively today as it did when it was first published in 1939. Look at any photographs of Iraq war veterans with severed limbs and the same question still confronts you: is the war worth the cost? It is that focus that keeps the novel from drifting into long-winded speeches or diatribes. Because we never see the world outside of Joe’s mind, we are trapped in the argument of “Why? Was it all worth this?” Therefore, the novel never feels preachy. Nor does the anti-war argument grow dated -– because it is not rooted in World War I (where the action takes place), or World War II (which the novel was released just prior to), but in the moral argument against war itself.Trumbo also does a superb job of making Johnny Got His Gun a “small novel.” It is not trying to encompass all the horrors of war, but just this one soul-wrenching example. You cannot help but cringe along with Joe when he feels a rat gnawing at the side of his body as he lies helpless on the hospital bed, unable to swat it away. As the reader, you share Joe’s isolation and helplessness.And yet, from this horror, Trumbo is even able to bring forth great humor. Take the scene of Christ playing cards with the soon-to-be-dead soldiers. He performs a minor miracle by making full whiskey glasses appear beneath each player (a sort of mock of the water-into-wine trick), but then winds up losing a hand of blackjack (“I never could hit a twelve he said in a complaining voice”).Throughout it all, Trumbo never lets you off the hook. You must look at Joe and see his fate. To look away (or stop reading in this case) is to deny the realities of war and its ultimate cost. Without giving away the ending, the book outdoes the movie (which Trumbo himself directed) in that it doesn’t over-argue the point. The sad resolution is not discussed as a great moral quandary, but rather a matter of regulations. Ultimately, the army’s regulations turn a blind eye to the truth that lies before them.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Excellent book ! A must read for any person that thinks that going to war is a patriotic thing to do, or that wars are justified.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Dalton Trumbo is the most famous member of a group known as the Hollywood Ten, writers and directors who were blacklisted during the crazed days of the McCarthy Era. Yet, it is not his decades of writing Academy Award winning screenplays that has secured his reputation as a writer and spokesman for generations. It is his anti-war novel, Johnny Got His Gun, the epic story of a World War One soldier who lies, half-dead and senseless in an army hospital confronting the bleakest of futures. This book was so powerful that it was widely banned in the run up to World War Two–the author himself pulled the novel from publication because he did not want it to influence the outcome of the war. It is simply the greatest anti-war novel ever written. It is not an easy book to read and readers should know, going in, that they will come away from the story, sickened, repulsed, and very, very angry. They will also come away enlightened and changed forever.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Impressive that a story that takes place entirely in the head of a limbless, faceless deaf mute could be as engaging as it was. The ending is hilarious and heartbreaking at the same time.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    It's hard to say very much about johnny got his gun without giving away the "big surprise" that's unveiled a little more than halfway through (yeah, yeah, I know: it seems like everybody who's even heard of this book knows what the "big surprise" is, but if you don't, I won't be the one to spoil it...); suffice to say, this is a riveting and harrowing anti-war novel (the war used is World War I, but really, the "horrors of war" are universal) that went out of print after the U.S. entered what would come to be known as the Second World War. In his first introduction, Trumbo notes that, during WWII, there were howls of protests from right-wing groups demanding the book's republication (said groups also denounced "Jews, Communists, New Dealers and international bankers"), while the editions that appeared after 1945 "found favor with the general left." The book went out of print during the Korean War (Trumbo himself recommended to his publisher that the book be put out of circulation "for the duration" during WWII; he remains tactfully silent about the Korean War, but notes that, at that time, he bought the plates for johnny got his gun "rather than have them sold to the government for conversion into munitions"), but check out those publication dates, kids: it would take the U.S.'s involvement in the conflict in Vietnam to push the sales of johnny got his gun through the stratosphere. Trumbo wrote and directed the movie adaptation of johnny got his gun, but it's not very good (see my comments); read the book instead, or at least read the book first.And for any doubting Thomases who say that Joe Bonham surely couldn't survive in such a state, may I heartily recommend Ernst Friedrich's anti-war "pickcher" book War Against War! (1924), specifically the photos of the veterans with massive and horrific facio-cranial injuries? WWI was a veritable godsend for surgeons, plastic and otherwise, and soldiers of pretty much all sides were the guinea pigs that the doctors cheerfully learned their trade on.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I agree with Lisa B. I read this book 31 yrs ago and it still haunts me.This book makes you think and re-evaluate your own thoughts and opinions. You may or may not change those opinions but this book will touch you.I do feel this is a must read for all teens.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    i read reviews here of persons who found it shattering beyond words. i wrote about it in my school paper column endlessly. i am so glad its impact has not lessened one bit. the blistering concept, how Trumbo did it,, and man you never forget joe bonham . Those are stunning from from the bones reviews. i cannot add to them.. tell the world. "you point the way, you masters of men, and we will point the guns." God.Oh god.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Definitely not one for any books about war, but this tantalizing tale of a man slowly realizing his situation while recounting his life at the same time is definitely worth my time