Life After Life Themes

REM whined that everybody hurts, and on our morbid days (or when we're finding Michael Stipe extra whiny), we like to replace that with "everybody dies." After all, there's no avoiding it, no matte...

Video games aren't the only place where you can get infinite lives. Ursula's life can seem like a video game in Life After Life, one with endless continues. And just like when you're trying to perf...

You can pick your friends, and you can pick your nose, but you can't pick your family or your grandma's nose… or something like that. We don't have the saying exactly right, but the core truth is...

There are few books that span not just one but two wars. Life After Life shows quite a contrast between World War I and World War II, both of which Ursula Todd lives through. (Well, to varying resu...

Women's suffrage is in full swing by the time Ursula is born in Life After Life, and she finds herself caught between two schools of thought: one that eschews the whole concept of school and though...

People were often so prude about sex in the early 1900s that it's surprising the human race didn't just die out. But even though people didn't talk about it, they still did it. Often. In Life After...

If love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage, then during the course of Life After Life, the horse has Equine Encephalomyelitis and the carriage has a broken axle. Love hardly ever fa...

There are plenty of times when we can't remember what we had for breakfast the other day. (And this will keep happening until we turn to Soylent and give up food forever.) So needless to say, we ca...

Some things are inevitable, like death, taxes, and kitten memes, but does that mean that they're fate? Are we all just fated to die? Or can we change that? And how self-centered must you be if you...

If people didn't harbor prejudice against others, the world would be lacking a lot of things: slavery, World War II, Pride and Prejudice. To be clear, we think it would be more than a fair trade-of...