The University of Chicago Magazine
December 1997
Kurt Vonnegut, AM'71, shocked fans this fall by announcing that his new book, Timequake (G. P. Putnam's Sons), would be his last. "I'm almost 75!" he told the Chicago Sun-Times when he was in town for an October 3 reading and discussion at Mandel Hall. "Enough! I've been allowed to say everything I ever wanted to say. There is nothing else bottled up inside of me." Fans turned out in droves for his book tour; the October 6th New Yorker reported that a New York City Barnes & Noble had to turn away hundreds of people, including some who had traveled from other states. "The minute the first people saw him, they started clapping and stood up as he walked through the room," Jill Krementz, Vonnegut's wife, told the magazine. "It was like being with Muhammad Ali." The New Yorker described Timequake, "the husk of a novel that he worked on for a decade and finally abandoned in despair," as "a disconnected set of musings, some autobiographical, some in the voice of his fictional alter ego, Kilgore Trout."
Taking teamwork to new extremes, U of C law professor David Strauss and his wife, City of Chicago attorney Benna Ruth Solomon, managed to care for their two children and house while both prepared to argue before the U.S. Supreme Court. During the second week in October, the Chicago Tribune reported, Solomon argued that a dispute over two historic mansions belonged in federal, not state, court; the week before, Strauss-on his 15th visit to the court-represented an environmental group that had sued a steel company. Daughters Hannah, 7, and Julia, 5, helped ease the tension, Strauss said. "How seriously can you take an argument when you've got a daughter trying to explain the difference between plant-eating and meat-eating dinosaurs?"
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