This one is so silly funny. Kurt self-inserts as a reporter who has controlled near death experiences to interview people beyond the grave. He interacts with St. Peter at the gates of heaven and talks to everyone from Newton to MLK’s killer. It is evident he thinks highly of certified cool guys like John Brown and Isaac Asimov. Yet again, he provides such funny political and philosophical dialogue as well as interpretations of how those in heaven look down at what’s going on here.

“If what Jesus said was good, what can it matter if he was God or not?”

In the late nineties, Kurt Vonnegut was “Reporter on the Afterlife” for the WNYC radio station. This short book is a compilation of his radio spots where he interviews deceased people at the pearly gates of heaven. From famous to not so famous people, Kurt asks them weird, sometimes important, questions and gets equally strange answers back. Dr. Kevorkian assists him in his journey to the afterlife and brings him back each time. I liked his interview with Adolf Hitler, Isaac Asimov, and Isaac Newton the most. Neil Gaiman's introduction was very well-written and funny.

The title of God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian is a play on Vonnegut's novel God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (which, incidentally, is one of my least favorite of his works). In this slim volume, Vonnegut imagines himself strapped to a gurney by Dr. Kevorkian as he takes twenty-one trips down "the blue tunnel to the pearly gates"—that is, he imagines himself dead, or almost dead, to talk to some of the departed people that he finds in heaven. There is no hell, mind you—only heaven.

Anyway, if you've read your Vonnegut, you'll find many of the same characters, jokes, and anecdotes that he scattered throughout his works. Some parts of God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian seem to have been taken almost verbatim from Vonnegut's novels, which was clear to me after having only recently read Timequake (where Vonnegut, too, jokes about telling the audience of the humanist association that Asimov is up in heaven now). There is not much new, then, for the dedicated Vonnegut reader. All the same, it was a nice enough read; slightly morbid, but I read it late at night, when everything seems darker anyway.