Authors: Kurt Vonnegut
ISBN-13: 9780385333481, ISBN-10: 038533348X
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Date Published: September 1998
Edition: (Non-applicable)
Kurt Vonnegut was forever established in the literary pantheon and on the school syllabus with the publication of his brilliant antiwar novel Slaughterhouse-Five, but he endured as a purveyor of mind-warping, surreal fiction that just so happened to be funny.
Cat's Cradle travels from the home turf of Vonnegut's imagination, Ilium, N.Y. to a Caribbean banana republic where an illicit religion called Bokononism is practiced, as a sense of doom (in the form of icenine) overtakes mankind.
Cat's Cradle is an irreverent and often highly entertaining fantasy concerning the playful irresponsibility of nuclear scientists. Like the best of contemporary satire, it is work of a far more engaging and meaningful order than the melodramatic tripe which most critics seem to consider "serious."