Just Finished Reading Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

Cat's Cradle, which I just finished reading, is a 1963 novel by Kurt Vonnegut.  The protagonist is the first-person narrator Jonah (or John), who encounters the Hoenikker family as he researches a book he is writing about what different people did on the day of the Hiroshima bombing in August, 1945.  The Hoenikkers...fictional products of Vonnegut's imagination...are important here because the surviving three children's father was a scientist credited with being the father of the atom bomb.  Professor Felix Hoenikker appears to represent all scientists who go about their work with blinders on about the implications for the world regarding their discoveries...a case in point is his invention of a crystalline water form called "ice-nine", suggested to Hoenikker in passing one day by a military man referring to the problem of marines getting bogged down in mud...and wouldn't it be nice if somehow we could freeze the water in it under normal temperatures to provide a solid surface.  The old professor, without any regard to how this might affect the world at large, then goes about producing the ultimately very dangerous substance...

Jonah intersperses his narration with quips from a fictional religion called Bokononism...resembling Zen Buddhism in places and invented by a man named Bokonon to comfort the impoverished population of San Lorenzo, a small Caribbean island nation which he has adopted as his home.  On a job assignment, Jonah travels there where the Hoenniker children, the island's strongarm dictator, ice-nine and Bokononism all intersect to deliver the world's fate...while he tries to derive some meaning from it all...

Cat's Cradle to me was intended as a satirical farce as Kurt Vonnegut used ice-nine to expose the selfishness and shortsightedness he saw within the scientific community, as well as examining the love-hate relationship people...and especially their leaders...have with regard to religion.  He also pokes fun at different personality types...this kind of reminded me of Joseph Heller's great novel Catch-22, which came out only a couple of years earlier.  Of Vonnegut's three novels that I have read so far, Cat's Cradle is my favorite.  If you dig irony and satire, and don't mind having one or two of your own cherished "sacred cows" toppled in the process, you might go for it as well...