I believe everyone should read Kurt Vonnegut. I also believe that if you read him at only one time in your life, it should be when you are young. Most of the Vonnegut I have read was before or well before I was 30. His various novels, especially my favorite SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE, detail the worst of what the world might offer but also the best of how we can handle it. However fantastic the goings on, the strength of our humanity will be what gets us through. This is largely why he was so popular among college kids in the sixties who were tossing off the time worn structures of religion and politics and embracing humanism. I took his books as a tuning fork setting the tone for how I perceived the world: hard but not without hope. What fascinated me about this collection of Vonnegut materials (mostly worth reading) is that it seemingly unconsciously reveals what happens to old humanists. When you consider humanity responsible for all that is wicked and wonderful in the world, you have no safety net other than your own contentment with what you have done. And part of getting older and older and old is evaluating the paths you have chosen that determine that contentment. This book indicates this isn't always a restful process. Vonnegut's humor and humanity still twinkle but also at times a gloom is cast that can be quite unsettling--as if hope had escaped Vonnegut. In my 50's now, I pride myself on still hearing that tone I picked up from Vonnegut years ago. Sometimes I have to strain to hear it or seek a quiet place from which to listen--but it is still there. That is not always evident for Vonnegut himself in this book. Maybe this explains the title better than anything else. In the end we are our own countries, our own world, our own responsibility. As we live, we learn but knowledge should not be the enemy of hope--but it certainly has a habit of wounding it.

While pondering this review I kept thinking of the Coen Brothers and in particular their movie THE BIG LEBOWSKI. I would like to think that among the last thoughts of Kurt Vonnegut was something as reassuring as "The Dude Abides". If you don't know what that means watch the movie. If then you still don't know what it means, watch it again. So it goes.