Life After Life Tough-o-Meter

(4) Base Camp

Reading Life After Life is easier than walking into a German café and shooting Hitler in the 1930s. Okay, Ursula makes that look really easy, so maybe that's not the best comparison. Unlike books actually written in the 1940s—like those by Camus, Hemingway, and Steinbeck—the text of Life After Life isn't as dense. But that doesn't mean it isn't full of historical allusions (like some Nazi name-dropping you might have to look up), philosophical thoughts about death and rebirth, and some brutal sequences of dying during times of war. Still, though, this is a Life worth living, or reading, as the case may be.