Kurt Vonnegut is one of my favorite authors and this may be his best book. High schools are using it today to lure kids into the thrill of reading and into the enjoyment of discussing something important about what they have read. What a dirty trick to play on these poor kids. If the kids are not careful, they may get hooked on Vonnegut and reading while the video games gather dust.

Billy Pilgrim, the novel's protagonist, has come unstuck in time. Billy bounces backwards and forwards from World War II and the horror of the fire-bombing of Dresden, Germany, (where he was a POW), to the suburban life of the fifties and sixties, to the zoo on the planet Trafalmador (where he and a Playboy Playmate are the zoo's specimens from earth). Sounds silly? You bet. But beneath the silliness beats a forceful anti-war story with a thought provoking outlook on life.

Billy can't seem to figure out why he no longer has a linear life, why he zips forwards and backwards - old age to childhood in a single night, a single moment. As the Trafalmadorians say: "Everything that ever has been, always will be. And everything that ever will be, always has been." Vonnegut is a fatalist. Yet, remarkably, he celebrates humanity, and our striving to better our condition in spite of all the cards stacked against us. This peculiar combination reads as peculiarly uplifting.

Vonnegut once asked, "Does anyone out of high school still read me?" The answer is an emphatic "Yes." Because the reasons English teachers use Vonnegut to lure their students into the love of reading are the same reasons those of us who are already there read him. Try him...You'll like him.