"My first near-death experience was an accident, a botched anesthesia during a triple-bypass," Vonnegut writes at the outset of this comical fictional adventure, a flirtation not with death so much as with our very aversion to it. In God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian, Vonnegut skips back and forth between life and afterlife as if the difference between them were rather slight. All the qualities that make Kurt Vonnegut an inimitable voice - his irreverence, humor, love of humanity, and power to make readers stop and think - permeate this book of vignettes. In 30-plus "interviews" with such late luminaries as Sir Isaac Newton, Clarence Darrow, William Shakespeare, and Kilgore Trout, Vonnegut paints an afterlife filled with characters of great dignity and wit who made their unique contributions by simply being who they were. His "lesser-known" heroes include a man who died of a heart attack rescuing his schnauzer from a pit bull.