NYLONbooks

Cat's Cradle

Cat’s Cradle, June 2009, 8/10.

Written by Kurt Vonnegut, Published by Dial Press.

Another Vonnegut novella that has become a modern classic and another that was too much of a science fiction book for me to have really loved, which is not to say this I didn’t think that this was a fine book. The everyman narrator does a good job of getting (and holding) the reader’s attention, making the implausible seem ordinary, but what really draws the reader here is not the story on the surface but the messages that it conveys. Drawing on an invented religion (treated as a type of official book of lies) and man’s ability to destruct, the writing is rarely punctuated by the obvious truths that the author rarely allows out. Other major ideas focus on personal responsibility and the benefits of truth.