One generation held the book and the author in reverence. And with Tom Rostons new book The Writers Crusade and the Many Lives of Slaughterhouse Five a new generation is discovering the unique importance of Vonneguts vision or war and humanitys potential. At the time Vonnegut wrote this classic World War Two fiction mixed with nonfiction, PTSD was unknown. Today we ask what is sane and what insane about war. Rostons book about a book shares what Vonnegut meant by the cryptic phrase So it goes. And he examines the depression with which Vonnegut lived.