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history

“No damn cat, and no damn cradle!” | Sandweiss on Cat’s Cradle

Eric Sandweiss   In Cat’s Cradle, his first novelistic foray out of the postwar gloom of Mother Night, Vonnegut awakens to find the shell-shocked, the disillusioned, the displaced—here a Soviet dancer, there a Nazi doctor, an American defense contractor, a dissipated playboy-turned-humanitarian, and so on—still bouncing about a world turned upside down by generations of global war. We know little …

History . . . by a Hare | Sandweiss on Mother Night

Eric Sandweiss   “The march of time.” “The progress of mankind.” “Time’s arrow.” I admit I had not encountered the image of history as a swift hare (nor art as the defeated tortoise, watching its rival jump into the lead) until I approached the finish line of Mother Night (261), Vonnegut’s first novel-length reckoning with the people and places of …