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Camp Concentration: A Novel | 
 enlarge | Author: Thomas M. Disch
Publisher: Vintage
Category: Book
List Price: $12.00
Buy New: $6.00
You Save: $6.00 (50%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  39 reviews
Sales Rank: 156472
Media: Paperback
Edition: Vintage Books Ed
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 192
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.1 x 0.6
ISBN: 0375705457
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780375705458
ASIN: 0375705457
Publication Date: April 27, 1999
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com Review
Thomas M. Disch is one of the overlooked masters of science fiction, and Camp Concentration is one of his finest novels. The unlikely hero of this piece is Louis Sacchetti, an overweight poet who's serving a five-year prison term for being a "conchie," or conscientious objector, to the ongoing war being fought by the United States. Three months into his sentence, Sacchetti is mysteriously taken from prison and brought to Camp Archimedes, an underground compound run by General Humphrey Haast. This is the so-called "camp concentration" of the book's title, a strange oubliette where inmates are given a drug that will raise their intelligence to astounding levels, though it will also kill them in a matter of months. Sacchetti's job is to chronicle the goings-on at Archimedes in a daily journal that is sent to Haast and other select members of the project. Through his writings, readers get to know the various characters that inhabit the camp, geniuses whose intellectual fires burn brightly even while their bodies slowly go cold. Although these latter-day Einsteins are supposed to be thinking up new ways of killing the enemy, most of the inmates are instead focusing their studies on alchemy, which Haast hopes will allow them to discover the secret of immortality. Camp Concentration is one of those SF books that falls squarely into the "literature" category both for the eloquence of Disch's writing and the timelessness of his ruminations on life and war. This is a thoughtful novel that offers insights into human existence, and it will likely stay with readers long after they have turned the last page. Ursula K. Le Guin summed up the book best in her cover blurb, which says simply: "It is a work of art, and if you read it, you will be changed." --Craig E. Engler
Product Description
Louis Sacchetti is a poet and pacifist imprisoned for refusing to enlist in the war against Third World guerillas. Sacchetti and the other inmates are used in perverse scientific experiments, and Sacchetti is infected with a germ that raises intelligence to incredible heights while causing decay and death.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 34 more reviews...
 Good, but not great July 21, 2008
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
One cover review called this the best book ever ... not sure I'd go anywhere near that far, but it was good enough. I wish it had explained more of the background of the universe the book took place in (there was just enough to get the gist), and it had a nice plot twist at the end. Maybe I'm just not well-read enough, but many, if not most, of the classical references were lost on me. I was able to read this on a trip from Charlotte, NC, to Burlington, VT, with a storm delay in the middle, so even if you're only mildly interested, it won't take long to get through it.
Intelligent fun the old-school way... December 29, 2007
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
Written about forty years ago when the Vietnam War made its paranoia particularly relevant, *Camp Concentration* is once again pointedly relevant during our current "War on Terror" age. Poet Louis Sacchetti ((a play on the infamously executed pair Sacco and Vanzetti)) is a conscientious objector to an unspecified war against the Soviets. Imprisoned for his anti-war sentiments, Sacchetti is soon recruited into a top-secret experimental research project at an underground facility called Camp Archimedes. There he's asked to continue the prison diary he's been keeping, to write down a completely honest and unsparing account of what he experiences at the camp. From the suspiciously plush accommodations, the encouraging warden, and the intellectual brilliance of his fellow inmates, Sacchetti deduces something is horribly wrong at Camp Archimedes. That deduction is soon confirmed by one inmate's bizarre fascination with alchemy and another's foretold death by a rapidly accelerating illness.
*Camp Concentration* is SF as written when PK Dick was still influencing SF, before the field was overgrown with turgid multi-part sword-and-sorcery sagas, politically-correct retellings of creaky old space operas, and deep space tech adventures jazzed up with all the latest scientific gobbledy-gook. Disch gives us instead the kind of lean, mean, old school SF novel that speculates about the Big Ideas--the fate of privacy, freedom, identity, God, love, sex, and death as humanity stands at the border of a perilous future.
By turns a dark, haunting, even suspenseful novel, *Camp Concentration* is full of philosophical musings--and rantings--that quicken the pulse--and the mind. Sadly there aren't many--if any--SF authors at work today who can match Disch's breadth of knowledge or level of intellect. Or his conciseness. There is more to think about in *Camp Concentration's* 180 odd pages than in the typical 600 page paper brick you'll find dominating the SF racks today. SF, like most other popular fiction genres, has degenerated into pap and sap fit to feed the greatest number of chickens possible.
Although Disch resolves the plot in what seems to me a rather hurried, unconvincing, and arbitrary way, pulling a "happy ending" out of his sleeve at the last possible moment as if obligated to provide us readers with an uplifting and edifying ending ((and perhaps he was so obligated or felt himself so)), *Camp Concentration* otherwise is that rarest of reads--an entertaining and thoughtful novel by a popular writer who actually has something profound to say.
 Not your typical sf, and better for it June 23, 2006
Highly literary, 'Camp Concentration' began life as a serialized novel published in 'New Worlds' - the showcase magazine for the British New Wave movement in SF at the end of the 1960s. This movement wanted to revitalize SF by improving the writing and exploring psychology instead of other worlds. This novel attains both of those goals. Indeed, Disch's command of prose is amazing, and in a Pynchon-like fashion he refers to historical people/events and other literary works regularly. A good dictionary is also a plus in reading this, as well as access to language translation programs. But unlike Pychon, you can still follow the fairly chronological story without looking up references and definitions (although there is a purposefully difficult section towards the end - don't worry, I said purposefully - it's supposed to convey an almost manic intelligence bordering on insanity, so I don't think we're supposed to understand all of it).
This is no derivation of 'Flowers for Algernon.' Nor is this meant to be a fast-paced plot driven book. It is instead a meditation on intelligence, governmental abuse, conscientious objection, science vs. alchemy vs. religion, the purpose of art, ethics, etc. This, along with '334,' is Disch at his finest.
Ever wanted to be super smart? January 21, 2006
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
I have to admit that I would never have picked up the book if I hadn't seen the cover with the barcode on the back of the neck of the person with the shaved head. Sometimes a cover can really help sell a book!
I loved this book despite its minor flaws. It did leave me with a number of questions and one is left to their own conclusions as to how it will all play out after the final page has been read, but for those who love a read that makes you think, this is for you.
As a prior reviewer comments, it really does remind me of linguistic feats of The Crying Of Lot 47 by Pynchon or even his Gravity's Rainbow. It is not an easy read, given the vocabulary level necessary to relay what is happenign and much is left out, but it is nevertheless very rewarding.
Sorcerers of Death's Construction August 15, 2005
5 out of 6 found this review helpful
"Camp Concentration" reads as an early foray of what would later be called the "New Wave" of SF: literary and countercultural, in the vein of Dick, Delany and LeGuin. Whereas "Golden Age" SF writers were in thrall to the "American Dream," here we begin to see the darkness of the realities of power.
Louis Saccheti (shades of Sacco-Vanzetti?) comes off as a rather bland and bloated fellow early in the novel, primarily concerned with the prison food he is being served as a conscientious objector to the massive nuclear war being waged by the U.S. However, we then witness his transformation after the government injects him with a syphilis-derivative spirochete which multiplies his intelligence as it consumes his body within months (see the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment).
As Sacchetis' intellect explodes, so does his vocabulary, sending me scrambling to look up several words per page in the unabridged dictionary. Saccheti's intellect also manifests itself as the loss of his religious faith, sending him back to the atheism of his teens. An interesting idea: perhaps the flights of hormonal teenage minds are closer to "genius" than the dulled edges of their elders'.
The book is not perfect. In the middle, we take a lenghty detour when some of the geniuses try to perfect the ancient magick of alchemy with the philosopher's egg, and the general in charge of the camp buys it all hook, line, and sinker. I found it somewhat unbelievable (even though it is well-established that some of our past senile Commanders-in-Chief subscribed wholeheartedly to astrology).
I found it interesting how the story of the camp concentrated much of human history, beginning with aspirations towards alchemical magick, and ending with a confrontation between an absolute, Naziesque scientific materialism and the poetic dreams of Saccheti. Disch has managed to fit much of the human story into this slim allegorical volume.
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