Perspective

Fates Worse Than Death (1991) is a sequel to Kurt Vonnegut's Palm Sunday (1980), unasked for, he modestly explains - too modestly it would seem, judging from critics' comments printed on the back cover and flyleaf. The titles that have flowed from his acerbic pen, listed facing the title page (a few of which Vonnegut discusses in the text), show that a popular, successful satirist has decided to "sound off" again. As in earlier writings, Vonnegut has favorite subjects on which to meditate and at which to fulminate, the great, formative events of his life. He has grown up a fourth-generation German-American Freethinker during the Great Depression. His mother commits suicide on Mother's Day 1944, after a long decline into nighttime madness. He is taken captive by the Germans in World War II and is forced to carry to great funeral pyres the civilians killed in the firebombing of Dresden.

Since...