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[|Amazon link]  =Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut = This novel is the first-hand account of Howard Campbell, Jr., an American-born citizen who moved to Germany as a child and became the English-speaking radio mouthpiece for Nazi Germany during World War II. As we begin the novel, he has been found and is writing this account from a jail cell in Israel, awaiting trial for his crimes against humanity. While he is reviled by almost everyone on earth as an American Nazi traitor, the truth is that he was actually an agent working for the American government during the war; this is a truth he cannot prove, though. A series of significant events forces Campbell out of the cocoon of his past fifteen years, and his thoughts and actions along the way provide big juicy morsels of food for thought: taking personal responsibility for one's actions, the harsh truths of war and peace, the sometimes vast differences between truth and fact, individual redemption before self and society, finding direction and a purpose in a world gone mad, etc.

[|Amazon link] = **Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut** = Kurt Vonnegut's absurdist classic //Slaughterhouse-Five// introduces us to Billy Pilgrim, a man who becomes unstuck in time after he is abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. In a plot-scrambling display of virtuosity, we follow Pilgrim simultaneously through all phases of his life, concentrating on his (and Vonnegut's) shattering experience as an American prisoner of war who witnesses the firebombing of Dresden. Vonnegut's isn't a conventional, or simple, novel. It fashions the author's experiences in the Second World War into an eloquent and deeply funny plea against butchery in the service of authority.

Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
Blending his patented wry humor with acute social insight presented in an absurd fantasy world, Vonnegut has written an exceptional novel of love, lies, and the self destruction of mankind. The story centers around a narrator who is writing a book on the events of the day the first atomic bomb was dropped on Japan. Destiny leads our protagonist to the impoverished island republic of San Lorenzo, where among other adventures, he finds religion, falls in love, and becomes president. __Cat's Cradle__ is rife with painfully accurate insights into the institutions that our society holds so dear, such as, religion, politics, and science.

God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater by Kurt Vonnegut
In this book, Vonnegut takes on the class system, capitalism, and philanthropy to splendid, wickedly funny -- and hopelessly accurate -- effect. It is the tale of the Rosewater family, which has amassed a fortune and devised an elaborate foundation to protect their money from the American government that would try to tax it away from them. Through meaningless acts of "charity" (such as loaning expensive art to a museum for an exhibition, and then taking it back) the foundation ensures that the Rosewater fortune will always be firmly controlled by the Rosewater family. Trouble brews when an ambitious young lawyer decides to prove that the current foundation head, Eliot Rosewater, is crazy. This will not be so difficult to do because Eliot has been doing the unthinkable since taking over the foundation from his Senator father: he has been using it to do actual charitable work. To the world at large these are the actions of a man who has totally lost his mind. But has he?

[|Amazon link] = March by Geraldine Brooks = Brooks's luminous second novel imagines the Civil War experiences of Mr. March, the absent father in Louisa May Alcott's //Little Women//. An idealistic Concord cleric, March becomes a Union chaplain and later finds himself assigned to be a teacher on a cotton plantation that employs freed slaves, or "contraband." His narrative begins with cheerful letters home, but March gradually reveals to the reader what he does not to his family: the cruelty and racism of Northern and Southern soldiers, the violence and suffering he is powerless to prevent and his reunion with Grace, a beautiful, educated slave whom he met years earlier as a Connecticut peddler to the plantations. In between, we learn of March's earlier life: his whirlwind courtship of quick-tempered Marmee, his friendship with Emerson and Thoreau and the surprising cause of his family's genteel poverty. Brooks, who based the character of March on Alcott's transcendentalist father, Bronson, relies heavily on primary sources for both the Concord and wartime scenes; her characters speak with a convincing 19th-century formality, yet the narrative is always accessible. Brooks's affecting, beautifully written novel drives home the intimate horrors and ironies of the Civil War and the difficulty of living honestly with the knowledge of human suffering.