God Bless You, Mr Rosewater

Description

The story of a man who reacts to past tragedy, family greed and fabulous wealth by promptly going insane With the satirical eye of his science fiction author alter ego Kilgore Trout, the author of Slaughterhouse-Five delivers a classic of modern American literature. Eliot Rosewater, President of the fabulously rich Rosewater Foundation and volunteer firefighter, is tortured by an inheritance he doesn't feel that he deserves. After (unfortunately) developing a social conscience, he sets out on a drunken tour of America, unravelling a little more at every stop until his path crosses with the science-fiction writer Kilgore Trout. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater is one of Kurt Vonnegut's funniest satires, about the pleasures, pains and perversions of people and money, the obsessions of a famous family and the collective madness of a nation.

Kurt Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis in 1922 and studied biochemistry at Cornell University. During WWII, as a prisoner of war in Germany, he witnessed the destruction of Dresden by Allied bombers, an experience which inspired Slaughterhouse Five. Vonnegut's black humor, satiric voice, and incomparable imagination first captured America's attention in The Sirens of Titan in 1959 and according to Harper's Magazine, established him as 'a true artist' with Cat's Cradle in 1963. He was, as Graham Greene declared, 'one of the best living American writers'. Vonnegut died in April 2007.

Vonnegut faces up to the less glamorous phenomenon of human mediocrity in this sharp, hilarious, boundlessly humane story. It taught me about compassion and a few things about writing good dialogue -- Michel Faber * Glasgow Herald * Rumbustious stuff... There may be greater novelists than Vonnegut, but there can be a few, if any, with as much good humour and generosity * Guardian * Filled with irony and black humour and a woozy bonhomie * Sunday Times * Wild hilarity * Sunday Telegraph * Extremely funny * Observer *