Rating: 
Summary: top vonnegut
Review: This is clearly one of KV's best books. He has a way of writing a science fiction book without it seeming like science fiction. The focus seems to be more on the characters than the plot idea. The description on the book jacket emphasizes all the wrong parts, so don't let that turn you off.
Rating: 
Summary: Ice-nine skating
Review: This wacky tale of a journalist who witnesses the end of the world is a wonderful satire filled with memorable imagery and witticisms. Since this is the first Vonnegut book I've read, I don't know if it's his best, but I certainly think it's a fascinating read. The use of a cat's cradle string-game as a metaphor for various ideas and things is quite astute and sparklingly new, even though the book is from 1963. This book is definitely for anyone interested in zany literature that challenges the status quo, of any sort.
Rating:
Summary: A Funny, Philosophical, Superb Romp-to-the-end.
Review: Vonnegut writes the book with the question that "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater" plays with on a different level, all the while throwing in philosophies, wit, and things to ponder on and about during the COLD WAR. The narrator (first-person incompetent) is somewhat vacant, and being so, maneuvers the story the best way possible. The narrator is writing a book on the atomic bomb and he travels about meeting strange people who know the creators of the bomb. The characters he meets are funny and strange (You would have to be an oddball to be toying with doomsday.). In his journey he finds the sons and daughter of the inventor of the A-bomb. He finds that these three are an eccentric and foolish trio. The daughter and sons hold with them ice-nine, a weapon that makes the a-bomb seem infantile. Ice-nine was an attempt by their father to make battlefields (mud) solidify, making battle easier on soldiers. It winds up making any moisture it touches solid and blue, but its one flaw is, once put into the atmosphere it regenerates without stopping, freezing everything in its path(including human beings). Vonnegut throws in the element of Bokononism, a quirky, weird religion spawned by an eccentric, self-made prophet named Bokonon. This angle plays in the mind of the reader as it debases the relevancy of all religions, thus, for example, making Catholicism or Islam just as strange as Bokononism. Bokononists chant about man being born of the "mud." Symbolically the three children holding ice-nine, a single flake of which will end mankind as we know it, stand for three world superpowers. It shows that anyone, no matter how high in power, can be foolish, and should have no access to such an element of destruction. The ice-nine is just a symbol of the end of mankind through the folly of science, for the ice-nine turns things bluish white, like ice--putting man in another ice-age, destroying all "mud". The island of San Lorenzo is like Cuba--through its history no one really cared about anyone else ceasing it, but since there is an odd belief there(Bokononism/Communism),people poke around there now. It shows how such a small place, like Cuba, in the Cold War, could be ground-zero for the end of humanity, and warns against intervention there. Being that the Cold War is over, this is an era piece that some may think is stagnate. Yet the tools to end civilization are still out there, so this book is relevant as long as science and government have and look for a greater means of destruction. Though this book is funny and eccentric on surface, it is ultimately found to be a political warning. This humorous look at what could be the end, parallels Orwell's "Nineteen-Eighty-Four" in the field of political writing for the sake of warning (Orwell warns about the threat of Totalitarianism, Vonnegut warns about man's acute closeness to his own demise). This book is not as hard-nosed as "Nineteen-Eighty-Four." It is funny, but this is done to show the folly and incompetence that mankind's demise is handled with: Vonnegut's use of juxtaposition is without flaw. Bokonon adds a religious facet to this novel. He ultimately shows folly and incompetence in the creation of something other than doomsday devices--religion. After the reader drops the hypocrisy of thinking their religion is "the one," Vonnegut brings up the question: Were people like Jesus or Mohammed just fools out spreading nonsense for the sake of an ego-trip? This book touches on so many intense questions. It puts forth a vehicle for such deep introspection, yet it is hilarious. I only wish I were to have read this in the mind set of the world in the early sixties, when this book was first published. Vonnegut was way ahead of his time with this one. His writing, when dissected, makes me think he is one of the great thinkers of the twentieth-century into the twenty-first...
Rating:
Summary: He Dared so We Could Only Relate
Review: What is society? Why does society leave behind those who influence it most? Why are some of the firmest establishments religion? Kurt Vonnegut dared to answer these ever-pondered questions in Cat's Cradle, a novel daring to talk about things that most men do not. Vonnegut satirically and facetiously explains and defines society, through a story about a bomb, a midget, a clarinet player, a mad scientist, and a man who just wanted some answers. How could Vonnegut have used these tools to explain such a large and vital factor? That is the magic of the novel as well as his unique and intense art. Vonnegut picked apart society's aspects and analyzed them, and then he proceeded to put them all back together, allowing one to look at the whole in a new light. The narrator does this through meeting people and describing their place in society effectively. However, when those characters were introduced, the author did not simply just bring them in and begin his descriptions, both physical and intellectual. All the descriptions of the vital characters were researched and unveiled to the reader beforehand, and of course Vonnegut always had a way of slipping them into the scene. By the time they were in the picture, the reader already knew them or knew of them. This factor made the novel enjoyable to exponential amounts. Vonnegut also challenged Christianity, and wondered why it was the firmest leaning post people have, especially American people. Why wouldn't a religion like Bokonon, the religion of the narrator, with its bittersweet lies aimed only at pleasing society, surpass this main stream religion, with its harsh truthfulness. The author's approach to this fact made the story fascinating because of the brightness and boldness of the idea. The structure of the novel, with small, neat 1 or 2 page chapters, depicts how thought is broken up into thought, just like the recollection that regular thinkers go through every day. The chapters do refer to each other interchangeably to make the story comprehensible. The titles of each of the chapters pertain to small details included in the text that stuck out in the narrator's mind. Any person can relate to this type of thought, since it is involved in any recalling of any story. The reader then flies through the novel and digests the story as any other would their own. This novel was incredible in the fact that Vonnegut dared to challenge so that in the end, the reader could do nothing but relate to his conjectures.
Rating: 
Summary: this is it?
Review: I don't normally read contemporary fiction, except for Don Delillo, but I figured I would read Vonnegut because I think I confused him with Updike and because there was a Graham Greene blurb on the back. In any case, Vonnegut's black humour is mixed with a little too much knowing misanthropy for my taste. There are no sympathetic figures in the novel, which is roughly based on Shakespeare's Tempest, or at least set on the same island, San Lorenzo, but I could be mistaken. Official ceremonies, scientists, Indiana, and ambassadors all get the superior treatment from our narrator, Noah. The only sympathetic figure may be the scientist who built the bomb, but of course his childlike scientific play will ultimately destroy the world one way or another. Cat's Cradle would be a much better movie than novel, but only if it starred OJ Simpson and was turned into a slapstick comedy, because otherwise the black humour is just humourless misanthropy and the fantasy a tired device.
Rating:
Summary: The Best Book Ever!
Review: This is my favorite book of all time. The end-of-humanity theme is presented in such a humorous manner, that you can't help but love it. The characters are great, and Bokononism, the fictional religion of most of the characters, is a constant entertainment. I recommend this book to anyone, especially if you enjoy other Kurt Vonnegut books (my personal "other favorites" are "The Sirens of Titan" and "Galapagos".
Rating:
Summary: Great book
Review: This book will knock you out. Its beautiful combination ofconvincing rhetoric and entirely ambiguous ( ) is what makes it so enjoyable. No one writes quite like this man, who can make you believe what he believes, and then make you believe completely contradictory nonsense. It's a trip.
Rating:
Summary: Kurt is my satiristic hero
Review: What is the purpose of mankind? As usual, Vonnegut has done the unthinkable. He's turned an absurd, worse case scenario into a very possible future. In the future mankinds fight against his own nature has escalated to a point that they no longer have a point. Machines and a few elite run absolutely everything. The I.Q. rules supreme and loyalty is unquestionable. The U.S.A. has fallen away from there onetime belief in the people. Usefullness and happiness has been replaced by convenience. The management of the country can not understand how someone without an electronic dust reducer in their home could possibly be happy. One time daily survival chores have been reduced via machines into a ten minute daily routine. What do you do now. How about head to work for the Recks and Reeks to pointlessly beautify a city that has already been made perfect so you can bring home your thirty dollar a week check. Or maybe you belong to the army and will therefore spend twenty five years cleaning your barracks and marching in parades with your wooden toy gun. The machines do everything so proficiently that the every day man is turned into little more than a show room slave. Modeling to other countries how good we have it over here. Government gives everyone a meaningless job and a prefab house. There is no hunger, no homelessness, no problems to overcome. Besides, maybe, what to do with your spare time besides sit in a bar and talk about your lack of realistic plans for the future.
Rating:
Summary: what an imagination!
Review: my first vonnegut book and, so far, my favorite. i did not have a sense of who vonnegut was or how he wrote when i picked up this book on a recomendation of a friend. 50 pages into it i really did not know if i was actually reading a novel or just some mad old fart rambling about chemistry and conflict. it jumps around in the usual post-modern fasion, leaving the reader to wonder where the author could possibly go with all of the seemingly usless information being hurled at us at every turn of the page. but soon i got a sense. then a grasp. then an almost privledged feeling as i saw the parts of the puzzle take their place. this seemingly incoherant babbeling was slowly starting to take shape and what's more, make sense. i could not put the book down. it hooked me with confusion and reeled me with its wit. i recomend this book as a pill for the mundane. a psychotic break from textbooks. and as a prime example for understanding the post-modern world in which we now live.
Rating: 
Summary: Builds fascinating layers and then collapses
Review: I thoroughly enjoyed the first 90% of this book. But then it was if if Vonnegut said, "Well, better end this now" and slapped on a contrived, simplistic, and extremely unsatisfying ending.
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