Cat's cradle

by Kurt Vonnegut

No cover — Kurt Vonnegut: Cat's cradle (1974, Delacorte Press)

231 pages

Published Nov. 8, 1974 by Delacorte Press.

(5 reviews)

Cat's Cradle is Kurt Vonnegut's satirical commentary on modern man and his madness. An apocalyptic tale of this planet's ultimate fate, it features a midget as the protagonist, a complete, original theology created by a calypso singer, and a vision of the future that is at once blackly fatalistic and hilariously funny. A book that left an indelible mark on an entire generation of readers, Cat's Cradle is one of the twentieth century's most important works -- and Vonnegut at his very best.

33 editions

Nick Barlow reviewed Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

Great ideas, but dated in parts

4 stars

I love Vonnegut's style in both the way he evokes huge images and events with sparse words and in his ideas, like this most banal and final of apocalypses with the world ending in ice-nine. The problem is that as we get further from the period it was written in, the assumptions it was written under, especially about the role of women and non-white (and non-American) people in the narrative and society, jar even more with the inventiveness going on around them.