This roller-coaster ride through the mind of one of the United States' most celebrated authors will leave many readers relieved that they are not the only sane person on the planet.

Kurt Vonnegut is best known for his novel Slaughterhouse 5 a graphic account of the Allied firebombing of the German city of Dresden during the Second World War.

Now he has written A Man Without a Country, a Memoir of Life in George W Bush's America.

Mixing political insights into the oil-soaked and blood-soaked policies of the White House with more personal accounts of growing up and his literary life, Vonnegut pulls no punches in telling it as he sees it.

He is constantly entertaining and surprising during this short book that, while cynical, offers hope that even though we are destroying the planet, there is still room for humanity along the way.

Vonnegut, now in his eighties, says that the United States for whose constitution he fought in the Second World War may have well have been invaded by Martians and body-snatchers.

And he adds: "Sometimes, I wish it had been. What has happened instead is that it was taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d'etat imaginable."

Bush, he says, has surrounded himself with people who know no history, no geography people who were born without consciences. Now they are in charge of everything.

Vonnegut is passionate and caring, incisive with his wit and hopeful in his humour.

Let us hope that one of his epitaphs included in this book doesn't come true: "The good Earth we could have saved it, but we were too damn cheap and lazy."

A Man Without a Country, Kurt Vonnegut,(Bloomsbury, £14.99)