Volume 1 includes interviews and reportage by Neil Sheehan, David Halberstam, Russell Baker, Meg Greenfield, Martha Gellhorn, Ward Just, Tom Wolfe, Mary McCarthy, Seymour Hersh, Francine du Plessix and others. Volume 2 includes reportage by Seymour Hersh, Francine du Plessix Gray, John Saar, Gloria Emerson, Sydney Schanberg, Flora Lewis, Peter Arnett, and others.

This collection of Vonnegut's early work opens with Player Piano (1952), a Metropolis-like parable of breakneck technological innovation and its effect on those it robs of their livelihoods. The Sirens of Titan (1959), the interplanetary adventures of the world's wealthiest and most despised man, is both a pulp-fiction space opera and a satire on the vanity of human striving. The confessions of a German-American double agent well placed among the...