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.


From Library Journal
Two modern giants (LJ 2/15/70 and LJ 11/1/61, respectively) join Knopf's venerable "Everyman's Library." If you've been searching for quality hardcovers of these two eternally popular titles, look no further.Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From AudioFile
Catch 22 is a gut-wrenching satire which attacks the absurdities in the dehumanizing military bureaucracy of WW II. Actor Peter Whitman delivers a well-rehearsed, fully voiced interpretation as he projects more than thirty personalities while maintaining a consistent narrator's voice. Although some voices are cartoonish, most are very credible. Whitman projects a plethora of emotions with sincerity. His Italian accents are excellent. However, a slower reading would have made more sense as long descriptive sentences accompany jarring dialogue, dizzy wordplay, and crazy irony. Also, several mispronunciations indicate incomplete proofing. The audio fidelity is very good, and the book's packaging is attractive and informative. All in all, a vibrant, worthy production. P.W. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine


Review
Robert Brustein The New Republic One of the most bitterly funny works in the language...explosive, bitter, subversive, brilliant.


Book Description
The phrase Catch-22 has entered the language since this classic was published in 1961. The title, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, part of Chelsea House Publishers’ Modern Critical Interpretations series, presents the most important 20th-century criticism on Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 through extracts of critical essays by well-known literary critics. This collection of criticism also features a short biography on Joseph Heller, a chronology of the author’s life, and an introductory essay written by Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities, Yale University.


The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature
Satirical novel by Joseph Heller, first published in 1961. The plot of the novel centers on the antihero Captain John Yossarian, stationed at an airstrip on a Mediterranean island in World War II, and portrays his desperate attempts to stay alive. The "catch" in Catch-22 involves a mysterious Air Force regulation which asserts that a man is considered insane if he willingly continues to fly dangerous combat missions, but that 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. The term catch-22 thereafter entered the English language with the meaning "a problematic situation for which the only solution is denied by a circumstance inherent in the problem" and later developed several additional senses. In 1994 Heller published a sequel entitled Closing Time, which details the current lives of the characters established in Catch-22.


Card catalog description
A guide to reading "Catch-22" with a critical and appreciative mind encouraging analysis of plot, style, form, and structure. Also includes background on the author's life and times, sample test, term paper suggestions, and a reading list.

ANNOTATION

As revealing today as when it was first published, this brilliant novel by the author of Picture This expresses the concerns of an entire generation in its black comedy. World War II flier John Yossarian decides that his only mission each time he goes up is to return—alive!

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Catch-22 is like no other novel we have ever read. It has its own style, its own rationale, its own extraordinary character. It moves back and forth from hilarity to horror. It is outrageously funny and strangely affecting. It is totally original.

It is set in the closing months of World War II, in an American bomber squadron on a small island off Italy. Its hero is a bombardier named Yossarian, who is frantic and furious because thousands of people he hasn't even met keep trying to kill him. (He has decided to live forever even if he has to die in the attempt.)

His problem is Colonel Cathcart, who keeps raising the number of missions the men have to fly.

The others range from Lieutenant Milo Minderbinder, a dedicated entrepreneur (he bombs his own airfield when the Germans make him a reasonable offer: cost plus 6%), to the dead man in Yossarian's tent; from Major Major Major, whose tragedy is that he resembles Henry Fonda, to Nately's whore's kid sister; from Lieutenant Scheisskopf (he loves a parade) to Major -- de Coverley, whose face is so forbidding no one has ever dared ask him his first name; from Clevinger, who is lost in the clouds, to the soldier in white, who lies encased in bandages from head to toe and may not even be there at all; from Dori Duz, who does, to the wounded gunner Snowden, who lies dying in the tail of Yossarian's plane and at last reveals his terrifying secret.

Catch-22 is a microcosm of the twentieth-century world as it might look to someone dangerously sane. It is a novel that lives and moves and grows with astonishing power and vitality. It is, we believe, one of the strongest creations of the mid-century.

FROM THE CRITICS

Nelson Algren - The Nation