More than fifty years after its first publication, seventy-four years after Kurt Vonnegut was inside Slaughterhouse-Five during the firebombing of Dresden, what does his great novel have to say to us? It doesn’t tell us how to stop wars. It tells us that wars are hell, but we knew that already. It tells us that most human beings are not so bad, except for the ones who are, and that’s valuable information. It tells us that human nature is the one great constant of life on earth, and it beautifully and truthfully shows us human nature neither at its best nor at its worst but how it mostly is,
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