Archie and Samad fought together in World War II, and both ended up back home in England. This is their story, or really their kids’ story. Around them are family, friends, school, work and community, packed full of their own stories too. The plot(s) kept things moving and brought in new interest and new characters, but it felt to me as if the plot took over towards the end and made characters do implausible things.
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Lots of short pieces relating to the art of the blurb. Initially the pieces seemed fairly light and amusing enough. But I thought the book got better towards the end, with a few pieces on related topics like publishing, cover art and children’s books. Wilder also covers tricky areas like psychology and blurbing books dealing with sensitive or controversial subjects (e.g. Lolita).
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Materialism has more than one definition in philosophy, and in this book Terry Eagleton discusses how they are treated by his cover stars Marx, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein (mostly). There is a lot of information about these three and others such as Thomas Aquinas, all filtered through Eagleton’s pretty sharp mind. He’s good at seeing parallels and bringing out similarities between apparently different thinkers.
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This is a zombie book. But the zombies in this book are not mindless monsters baying for “braaains”. They are the same ordinary people they were before becoming zombies, with ordinary thoughts and plans, except they also need to kill and eat normal people in order to survive. They don’t like it, but that’s how things are and they group together and try to make the best of it.
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