Word: vonneguts
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MOTHER NIGHT by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. 202 pages. Harper...
Mother Night was first published as a 350 paperback in 1962. Its appearance now in hardcover, reversing the usual procedure, can be regarded as an amusement tax chargeable to the author's growing reputation as a satirist. Vonnegut's targets are institutional: religion (Cat's Cradle), science and technology (Player Piano), philanthropy (God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, or Pearls Before Swine). Here the target appears to be patriotism. From Nazi Germany, Howard W. Campbell Jr. broadcasts Hitler's propaganda to the West. Even his wife does not know that he is a U.S. counter-intelligence agent...
...BERNARD VONNEGUT Cambridge, Mass...
...BLESS YOU, MR. ROSEWATER by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. 217 pages. Holt, Rinehart & Winston. $4.95. "God damn it," says Eliot Rosewater, custodian of what was once the 14th largest fortune in the U.S. ($87,472,033.61), "you've got to be kind." He is that almost archetypical American figure, the do-gooding sad millionaire, and he embellishes restrooms with melancholy graffiti: "If you would be unloved and forgotten, be reasonable." His heart smolders with love for the unlovable-volunteer fire men, science-fiction writers, the entire population of Rosewater County, Ind., his ancestral seat. To them, he disburses much money...
...high-voltage prize is too valuable for Dr. Vonnegut to quit. Next summer he and his frustrated Joves will return to Mount Withington armed with new apparatus, including giant bows and arrows, for firing fine wires high into lightning-charged clouds. The experiment, they point out, has an eminently practical purpose. Radar observation of thunderclouds has shown that lightning often precedes the formation of rain. Vonnegut suspects that the lightning creates vast numbers of charged particles that cause a cloud's small water droplets to attract one another and swell into drops large enough to fall as rain...