Hocus Pocus or, What's the Hurry, Son? - Tapa dura

It is the year 2001. Eugene Debs Hartke, a West Point graduate who, in 1975, found himself in charge of the humilitating evacuation of personnel from the roof of the American embassy 'after the excrement hit the air-conditioning' in Vietnam, now finds himself awaiting trial for supposedly masterminding the biggest prison-break in history - the escape of 10,000 convicts from the New York state maximum security Adult Correctional Institution. How did a good soldier who never used profane language come to be in such a mess? Time and luck. Unknowlingly fathering an illegitimate son with the young female war correspondent from the Des Moines Register on the way hoke form Saigon; marrying a pretty and personable young woman whose booby-trapped genes a re primed to fire her off into insanity; becoming a respected teacher of the terminally ineducable pupils of Tarkington College; remarking innocently that the dollar no longer ranks as a basic workd currency, having been supplanted by the Japanese Yen and fellatio - these things may, or may not, have had something to do with it...With Swifian satire and gonzo wit, Kurt Vonnegut juggles his favourite themes in a novel as fresh and brilliantly off-beat as anything he's written. Hocus Pocus is, quite simply, vintage Vonnegut.

Kurt Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis in 1922 and studied biochemistry at Cornell University. during the Second World War he served in Europe and, as a prisoner-of-war in Germany, witnessed the destructio of Dresden by Allied bombers, an experience which later inspired his classic novel Slaughterhouse-Five. His other novels include Cat's Cradle, Jailbird, Deadeye Dick, Galapagos and Bluebeard.