A critical overview of the work features the writings of Terry Southern, William S. Doxey, Jerome Klinkowitz, Richard Giannone, John L. Simons, James Lundquist, and other scholars.

• After the bomb, Dad came up with ice / Terry Southern
• Vonnegut's Cat's cradle / William S. Doxey
• The private person as public figure / Jerome Klinkowitz
• Cat's cradle / Richard Giannone
• Tangled up in you : a playful reading of Cat's cradle / John L. Simons
• From formula toward experiment : Cat's cradle and God bless you, Mr. Rosewater / Jerome Klinkowitz
• Playful genesis and dark revelation in Cat's cradle / Leonard Mustazza
• Bokononism as a structure of ironies / Zoltan Ab di-Nagy
• Mother night, Cat's cradle, and The crimes of our time / Jerome Klinkowitz
• Vonnegut's invented religions as sense-making systems / Peter Freese
• Icy solitude : magic and violence in Macondo and San Lorenzo / Wendy B. Faris
• Vonnegut's cosmos / David H. Goldsmith
• Cosmic irony / James Lundquist
• Cat's cradle : Jonah and the whale / Lawrence R. Broer
• Hurting 'til it laughs : the painful-comic science fiction stories of Kurt Vonnegut / Peter J. Reed
• The paradox of "awareness" and language in Vonnegut's fiction / Loree Rackstraw.