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Catch-22 | 
| Author: Joseph Heller
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Category: Book
List Price: $16.00
Buy Used: $3.85
You Save: $12.15 (76%)
New (89) Used (213) Collectible (9) from $3.85
Rating:  836 reviews
Sales Rank: 1154
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 464
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.5 x 1.2
ISBN: 0684833395
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780684833392
ASIN: 0684833395
Publication Date: September 4, 1996
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Amazon.com Review
There was a time when reading Joseph Heller's classic satire on the murderous insanity of war was nothing less than a rite of passage. Echoes of Yossarian, the wise-ass bombardier who was too smart to die but not smart enough to find a way out of his predicament, could be heard throughout the counterculture. As a result, it's impossible not to consider Catch-22 to be something of a period piece. But 40 years on, the novel's undiminished strength is its looking-glass logic. Again and again, Heller's characters demonstrate that what is commonly held to be good, is bad; what is sensible, is nonsense. Yossarian says, "You're talking about winning the war, and I am talking about winning the war and keeping alive."
"Exactly," Clevinger snapped smugly. "And which do you think is more important?"
"To whom?" Yossarian shot back. "It doesn't make a damn bit of difference who wins the war to someone who's dead."
"I can't think of another attitude that could be depended upon to give greater comfort to the enemy."
"The enemy," retorted Yossarian with weighted precision, "is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he's on."
Mirabile dictu, the book holds up post-Reagan, post-Gulf War. It's a good thing, too. As long as there's a military, that engine of lethal authority, Catch-22 will shine as a handbook for smart-alecky pacifists. It's an utterly serious and sad, but damn funny book.
Product Description
Catch-22 is like no other novel. It is one of the funniest books ever written, a keystone work in American literature, and even added a new term to the dictionary. At the heart of Catch-22 resides the incomparable, malingering bombardier, Yossarian, a hero endlessly inventive in his schemes to save his skin from the horrible chances of war. His efforts are perfectly understandable because as he furiously scrambles, thousands of people he hasn't even met are trying to kill him. His problem is Colonel Cathcart, who keeps raising the number of missions the men must fly to complete their service. Yet if Yossarian makes any attempts to excuse himself from the perilous missions that he is committed to flying, he is trapped by the Great Loyalty Oath Crusade, the hilariously sinister bureaucratic rule from which the book takes its title: a man is considered insane if he willingly continues to fly dangerous combat missions, but if he makes the necessary formal request to be relieved of such missions, the very act of making the request proves that he is sane and therefore ineligible to be relieved. Catch-22 is a microcosm of the twentieth-century world as it might look to some one dangerously sane -- a masterpiece of our time.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 831 more reviews...
 MASH January 2, 2009
MASH is definetly the one word to describe this book. I can't imagine that the sitcom, MASH, wasn't inspired by this book. You can even pick out certain characters although they are sometimes blended together or split apart. Although, MASH would have been limited to Cinemax if it was an accurate copy. There are a lot of sex scenes in the book.
I don't think I have ever read any book that made me laugh out loud more than this book. Some of the humor was very silly (like MASH), but I couldn't help laughing.
Catch-22 is about pilots in war and there are some war related scenes that are gruesome, but not too often.
Great December 21, 2008
The shipping time was good, and the condition of the book was as specified by the seller.
 So disappointed December 7, 2008
I gave up after about 150 pages - I wanted to keep going, I really did, and I've also grown worried that I find so many classics to be rather underwhelming; but I had to stop. I had seen the movie, and loved it, had heard all kinds of references to the book, and every time i opened it before, there were good sentences in it, the kind that drew you in. So I started reading and was fast disappointed - it's just a series of vignettes, of SNL sketches. It's not a real novel, it's an experimental one, of modernist flavor, where the story is not continuous, where, in fact, the author doesn't care too much about the story: he cares about the process, about showing how clever he is, about dialogue that is witty and absurd at the same time. Was this a disease of the times? I seem to remember Monty Python had similar stuff, the stuff that seems just clever and belabored now, not the stuff that has become classic.
I have to confess: I like linear narrative. I read a bunch of the other stuff and it just makes me tired. This jumping around, this collage of happenings just doesn't add up to a good story.
I heard somewhere that Heller was much influenced by Jaroslav Hasek (who wrote the Brave Soldier Svejk). I read Hasek, and found him to be much funnier than Heller - but then, again, Hasek was telling a story, whereas Heller is primarily displaying his skill with words.
"Deep-Seated Survival Anxieties" December 5, 2008
When Joseph Heller's wonderfully hilarious novel "Catch-22" was published in 1961, World War II was celebrated as the "good fight." Popular memory held it as a noble stand against the Axis onslaught and a glorious victory for democracy, as opposed to the more recent Korean War, a somewhat muddled thing with no rousing cause beyond vague theories of "containment." Needless to say, many found the irreverence and dark humor of "Catch-22" somewhat disturbing. Its hero, Yossarian, spends the story trying frantically to be sent home and not fly any more missions, while the United States military is depicted as an inanely irrational bureaucracy. The multifaceted "Catch-22" tells many tales, including a contemporarily relevant account of rhetoric gone wrong and the wiles of words used justify a variety of dubious causes in ways that make nonsensical sense. The result is a highly entertaining dark comedy that takes absurdity to new heights.
"Catch-22" has often been described as the insanity of modern life as seen from the perspective of someone who is perhaps too sane. Yossarian is perturbed by the very logical fact that thousands of people whom he does not know nor has ever even met are trying desperately to kill him. Common sense would indicate that it is best to remove oneself from such a situation, especially given the basic biological instinct for survival found in all animals. However, such is the incongruous nature of war, here only heightened by the fantastically illogical organizations running it. In order for Yossarian to be properly discharged from service, he must be proven mentally unfit for combat. Unfortunately, the very act of self-preservation is indicative of a sound man. That, as Doc Daneeka explains, is the principle of Catch-22. Although he admits it has a "spinning reasonableness" and an "elliptical precision about its perfect pairs and parts that was graceful and shocking," Yossarian remains steadfastly bound to the primordial value of life. It is later revealed that he came into his dangerously good sense after the gory death of his comrade Snowden in an air battle, thereby launching his quest to not fly any more missions. Alas, Colonel Cathcart, constantly trying to please his superiors so he can be promoted to general, persists in raising the number required. In essence, "Catch-22 . . . says you've always got to do what your commanding officer tells you to."
I think Yossarian's plight is perhaps that the individual must always work to oppose the domineering "vested interests" of business, government, and the military. Though vital to modern world, these establishments are often forced to rely on unscrupulous means to safeguard themselves against a populace rightfully dissatisfied with them. The core definition of Catch-22, according an old woman, is that "they have the right to do anything we can't stop them from doing." Of course, so that they cannot be stopped, Yossarian's goal must be to prevent those in the military command from continuing to utilize him like a tool for their own ends. Yet the individual can never entirely escape the officious, overbearing, yet coldly and impersonally distant bureaucracies of contemporary society. To do so would be to violate the shifting facades of principle upon which they rest. There is too little to be certain of. Still, there remains the old declaration of skeptical philosophy: "I think, therefore I am," as Descartes once phrased it. When the world takes on an air of unreality, when there is doubt of the very ground upon which one stands, there persists that one eternal verity: conscious life. Who wants a life, one character asks, if it is nothing but "a series of unfortunate events"? The response is another question: "What else is there?"
When it was fist published in 1961, "Catch-22" received mixed reviews and moderate success. As the sixties continued on, however, Joseph Heller's novel took on a new significance. An entire generation was coming to question the authority under which they lived, as well as its rhetoric of black and white, good versus evil. Granted, there is little to have loved about the Communist dictatorship of the Soviet Union, although some American leftists came to believe that there was, but nor could the actions of the United States be seen as wholly in the right. President Lyndon B. Johnson subsequently found that he could not talk the public into supporting the Vietnam War with fuzzy affirmations of "Courage, Might, Justice, Truth, Liberty, Love, Honor, and Patriotism" backed by geopolitical jargon about the importance of the Third World in the liberty-or-death struggle against global Communism. In "Catch-22," Yossarian finally decides to flee to Sweden: since the war is almost over, he would be risking his life for nothing but Colonel Cathcart's clamoring to be general. Meanwhile, in the real world, "Yossarian Lives!" would become a popular anti-Vietnam slogan. Escape was not an option for millions of young Americans in the late sixties who began to take "Catch-22" seriously and help make it into the classic it is today.
25 words or less November 17, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Even sloth and debauchery lose their power. Virtue and sanity are what's left over when you've tired of all vice.
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