What to do when you have the power; in the meantime, remember to skylark -- The terrible disease of loneliness can be cured -- Let the killing stop -- How to make money and find love! -- Advice to graduating women (that all men should know!) -- How to have something most billionaires don't -- How music cures our ills (and there are lots of them) -- What the "Ghost Dace" of the Native Americans and the French painters who led the cubist movement have in common -- How I learned from a teacher what artists do -- Don't forget where you come from -- Why social justice does more than art to nourish the American Dream -- How to be a wise guy or a wise girl -- Why you can't stop me from speaking ill of Thomas Jefferson -- Don't despair if you never went to college! -- How I got my first job as a reporter and learned to write in a simple, direct way, while not getting a degree in anthropology -- Somebody should have told me not to join a fraternity -- The most censored writer of his time defends the first amendment -- My dog likes everybody, but was not inspired by ancient Greece and Rome or the Renaissance -- Unstuck in time : quotes to ponder.
Summary:
"Best known as one of our most astonishing and enduring contemporary novelists, Kurt Vonnegut was also a celebrated commencement address giver. He himself never graduated college, so his words to any class of graduating seniors always carried the delight, and gentle irony, of someone savoring an achievement he himself had not had occasion to savor on his own behalf. Selected and introduced by fellow novelist and friend Dan Wakefield, the speeches in "If This Isn't Nice, What Is?" capture this side of Kurt Vonnegut for the first time in book form. In each of these talks Vonnegut takes pains to find the few things worth saying and a conversational voice to say them in that isn't heavy-handed or pretentious or glib, but funny and serious and joyful even if sometimes without seeming so"-- Provided by publisher.
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