Armageddon in Retrospect

Previously unpublished work from folksy humanist.
This posthumous collection of Kurt Vonnegut’s previously unpublished work is built for true Vonnegut-philes, for whom its contents will hardly seem new. Instead, Armageddon is like a few twists on the kaleidoscope, with all the components of the comic moralist’s distinguished literary career rearranged into a slightly different composition.

An introduction written and read by Vonnegut’s son, Mark, illuminates Vonnegut’s attitudes toward writing, “a spiritual exercise” that required Sisyphean effort but one which he doubted made any great social change. (And perhaps, given the repeated mistakes of U.S. foreign policy in his lifetime, it didn’t, though his oeuvre holds its own among the great books of the 20th century.)

Most of Armageddon‘s boulder-rolling works were written just after Vonnegut was freed from a POW camp in World War II Dresden, and the material (the stories “Just You and Me Sammy,” “Brighten Up” and “Guns Before Butter” and the essay “Wailing Shall Be in All Streets”) reflects mirrored fragments of that experience — much of which was later immortalized in his seminal novel Slaughterhouse-Five. But the book begins in the more recent past, with a speech written just before Vonnegut’s death in April 2007. Even in his final days, Vonnegut was an appealingly folksy humanist, challenging Marx-haters, the death penalty and the Iraq war, exhorting his listeners to eschew semicolons and keep their sense of humor during the Apocalypse. The audio version also boasts narration by actor Rip Torn — a natural match for Vonnegut’s plainspoken wisdom.