Book Club-Cat's Cradle-Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle follows narrator Jonah (or John) as he investigates what key figures were doing on the day the atomic bomb was dropped. His research leads him to the late Dr. Felix Hoenikker, a brilliant but morally detached scientist who helped invent the bomb and secretly created a substance called ice-nine—a variant of water that freezes at room temperature and can instantly solidify all liquid it touches. As Jonah interviews Hoenikker’s strange, scattered children and traces the legacy of their father’s invention, he is gradually pulled into a world where scientific irresponsibility, political absurdity, and human credulity collide.
The story eventually takes Jonah to the impoverished Caribbean nation of San Lorenzo, ruled by a buffoonish dictator and spiritually sustained by Bokononism, a playful, knowingly false religion that comforts its followers through irony and paradox. When ice-nine inevitably escapes into the environment, it triggers a global ecological catastrophe. Through dark humor and satire, Vonnegut uses the novel to critique humanity’s blind trust in technology, the seductive power of convenient beliefs, and the fragility of civilization when confronted with scientific discoveries we are morally unprepared to handle.