Kurt Vonnegut! Hero of my earliest adventures into literature! A cynic with a heart of gold and unmistakably a member of the cognoscenti. I remember well my sadness at hearing him state that he would never write another book. Yet now, here we have this, A Man Without a Country, unmistakably Vonnegut, definitely genius.

He’s getting on in years, but his perceptivity has not faded. He covers alot of topics in this book, and covers them with his unique brand of humor, and despite his assurances that he has given up on humanity, you cannot write a book like this without at least a touch of hope.

Title: A Man without a Country
Author: Kurt Vonnegut
LC Rating:

In A Man Without a Country Vonnegut vents his spleen on a number of issues, our current administration, our rampant destruction of the natural world and humanities ever-present foibles, but there is light here too, perhaps no better sentiment than his statement “I urge you to please notice when you are happy.” For me, that’s a great definition of cognoscenti.

He takes a moment to reflect on the craft of writing, and goes to the trouble of diagramming some of your basic plot developments. If you don’t laugh when you see Kafka’s graph, you’re not paying attention.

President Bush presents himself as a pretty easy target, but I can’t remember laughing so hard as I did when I read Vonnegut’s take on ol’ W’s revelation that ended his alcoholism. We all know that W credits Jesus with ending his difficulties, Vonnegut says “Other drunks have seen pink elephants.” Or how about the idea that W hates the Arabs because “They brought us algebra.”

This is better than just another book that brings out a number of good laughs, reading this is a reminder that there are other cognoscenti out there who are confronting the same basic problems as the rest of us, and they are still laughing. For that reason alone, A Man Without a Country is worth reading.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 25th, 2006 at 3:53 pm and is filed under indiscriminate, reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.