Never one for elaborate descriptions, Vonnegut wrote simply and camouflaged astute observations in oddball vignettes. It's like that here: Starving POWs swap elaborate recipes of meals they will eat one day; a young English boy in 1067 snares the local despot in a unicorn trap; the devil goes down to Schenectady and is trapped.
A speech Vonnegut wrote, but died before he could deliver and included here, shows he was full of vinegar until the end. "If Jesus were alive today," he wrote, "we would kill him with lethal injection. I call that progress."
Maybe the most interesting find in this book is the shortest piece: a 1945 letter Army Pfc. Vonnegut wrote to his family after his liberation. The artist as a young soldier wrote something like he did later on. He breezily describes capture, forced marches, starvation, labor, beatings, the destruction of Dresden and his unlikely survival through all of it. "I've too damned much to say," he concludes, "the rest will have to wait."
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