[Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons is a collection of Vonnegut's essays, reviews, and speeches.] His technique, properly applied, is unsurpassed. In a piece of speculative reporting such as "There's a Maniac Loose Out There," the account of a grisly crime on Cape Cod,… Vonnegut approaches his own opinion with a jigsawlike gallery of observations that leaves one meditating on one's own responses. And in "Excelsior! We're Going to the Moon! Excelsior!" he frequently follows his own paragraphs by repeating a word or phrase from within them, letting it reverberate as if to re-examine his own sentence from another, more interesting viewpoint…. Occasionally these techniques fall flat, leaving a sense of facility and emptiness. But more often their seemingly random perceptions provide a surprisingly acute moral juxtaposition.

Still, it is this very tone of moral insight which has gained Vonnegut his reputation as a humanist and a conveyor of wisdom that weakens his impact in the latter half of the collection. As his popularity grows and magazines begin to ask him to point his pithy pencil at politics and the like, Vonnegut loses strength as a writer. His message, after all, is the same in most of his works—a condemnation of the inhuman uses of technology, a bitter pessimism about the future, mixed with a romantic identification with the young and his own sunny little dream, the comforts of a folk society. He relates political events as well as the trivia of everyday life to such staggering absolutes as the end of the world, happiness to death, ambition to futility.

The essays and speeches here are dry, wry, self-deprecating. They brim over with humor…. Read all at once they may cloy, but sampled sparingly they provide as accurate a look at Vonnegut the man as can be found. But the only work of fiction in the collection, "Fortitude," reminds one of the double-edged satirical strength he achieves when he forgets about himself and recreates that enthusiastic intimacy with his own imagination that is not possible at the podium.