Written in a tone every bit as serious as a traditional survival book, The Zombie Survival Guide by Max Brooks (son of the man behind “Hitler Rap“) is chock full of tips on surviving a living-dead apocalypse, should one ever occur. Brooks has done a good job of defining in broad strokes the tools necessary for subsistence in pre-, mid-, and post-apocalyptic zombie wastelands. It’s clear that he has done his research by watching every zombie movie several times before creating one scientifically similar to those in 28 Days Later and I Am Legend.
Category: Book Reviews
In taking a month to finish Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs by Chuck Klosterman, I have had the opportunity to read and reread the laudatory blurbs that adorn Scribner’s first trade paperback printing.
The Onion A.V. Club calls the book “one of the brightest pieces of pop analysis to appear this century,” and the book reviewer over at GQ notes that the work is “sometimes exasperating but almost always engaging.” The key phrase in the Onion’s comment is “this century.” his book was originally published in 2003; three years is not a very long time in which to accumulate mass amounts of pop analysis. Also important is the GQ book reviewer’s choice to equivocate his or her exultation of Klosterman by including the great attenuator “almost.”
After seeing Malcolm Gladwell in an interview with Charlie Rose and receiving as a graduation gift a $50 gift certificate to Borders, I decided to pick up his latest book, What the Dog Saw (referred to hereafter as WDS), a series of essays collected from his work as a staff writer at The New Yorker. While somewhat disappointed to learn later that all of the essays appearing in WDS also appear free of charge on Gladwell’s website, I enjoyed the hefty, 410-page volume immensely, putting it down only for the occasional breath of fresh air or evening of Team Trivia. The book reads a bit like a greatest-hits collection, and like greatest-hits collections, it serves as a perfect introduction to the author.
At one point in the book Persepolis, Marji’s father tells her that “politics and sentiment don’t mix,” and yet much of the book’s power comes from precisely that combination–on the one hand, there are the horrible realities of the revolution and the war; and on the other hand, there is the example of Satrapi’s family, whose strength and love really do become a means of survival for Marji.
Taking into account both the book and the movie, how do you react to the father’s statement that “politics and sentiment don’t mix.” Do you think that Marji herself believes that? Do you think the women in her family–her mother and grandmother–would agree with the statement?
Throughout Percy Walker’s first novel The Moviegoer, narrator Jack “Binx” Bolling spends much of his time engaged in an intense inquest into the contents of his navel. He is a Walter Mitty wiling away his time (and the novel’s pages) with day-dreams, remembrances, and meditations on the mundane, movies, and the malaise.