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Editorial Review Product Description
The first look at the philosophical issues behind Charlaine Harris's New York Times bestsellers The Southern Vampire Mysteries and the True Blood television seriesTeeming with complex, mythical characters in the shape of vampires, telepaths, shapeshifters, and the like, True Blood, the popular HBO series adapted from Charlaine Harris's bestselling The Southern Vampire Mysteries, has a rich collection of themes to explore, from sex and romance to bigotry and violence to death and immortality. The goings-on in the mythical town of Bon Temps, Louisiana, where vampires satiate their blood lust and openly commingle with ordinary humans, present no shortages of juicy metaphysical morsels to sink your teeth into. Now True Blood and Philosophy calls on the minds of some of history's great thinkers to perform some philosophical bloodletting on such topics as Sookie and the metaphysics of mindreading; Maryann and sacrificial religion; werewolves, shapeshifters and personal identity; vampire politics, evil, desire, and much more. - The first book to explore the philosophical issues and themes behind the True Blood novels and television series
- Adds a new dimension to your understanding of True Blood characters and themes
- The perfect companion to the start of the third season on HBO and the release of the second season on DVD
Smart and entertaining, True Blood and Philosophy provides food—or blood—for thought, and a fun, new way to look at the series. ... Read more Customer Reviews (9) 
Interesting but intellectually fluffy
While certainly enjoyable, this book only scrapes the surface of true philosophical thought.Clearly written for the non-intellectual or only casually interested.It is certainly interesting and fun as a diversion, but I personally believe the philosophy of True Blood is far more complex than this book claims.
A Lot Better and More Useful than Expected
I'm a huge fan of True Blood but also a professor about to use Dead Until Dark in First Year Seminar, so I was hopeful of using some of this text in class.Honestly I was expecting the same sort of limited level I've come to expect from these books.No offense to the Philosophy community, but they are certainly books useful only in philosophy classes since most of the material in previous texts has been marginally clever but mainly...well argument for argument's sake.
This text will not give the real fan of the show anything new or enlightening, in fact if you are a fan of both the novels and the show you will find a few plots mistakes.But there are a couple of articles, especially Dressing Up and Playing Human or To Turn or Not to Turn, that I found fun and interesting.Both articles would work for non-fans of the show and asked some interesting questions that would translate well to a first year classroom (even if they offered no credible answers - why do philosophers like to talk in circles so much?!)
Again this is not ground-breaking stuff, it's more along the lines of articles these academics seem to have written because they are fans of the show and needed to get something published for their cvs (no offense but you know it's true).There are very few sources, and I'm not convinced that, as a group, they know much about vampires beyond this particular show or the novels.I kept thinking about how much better a chapter like Joseph Foy's Signed in Blood would have been if he had more material on the history of the vampire and personal rights.Plus I doubt these would have been published anywhere else with the extremely limited scholarship demonstrated.But it had me nodding my head on occasion and laughing out loud (well okay smiling) once or twice.
I'm glad I read it and I'm pleased that it might be worth using in class.But honestly if you are as much of a vampire nerd as I am who sees True Blood as part of a longer tradition, then you won't learn anything new.I say buy it, as someone who has a philosopher as a best friend I know how hard it is for these guys to translate their thoughts for a populist audience.Plus it's a lot better than the other two books on the show I wasted my money on (yes I'm talking about you Fangbanger's Guide & Truly Madly Deeply.)
3 stars for content and 1 more for effort.
Bland, repetitive, boring
I give this book 3 out of 5 stars because although the writers are educated academics or professor types (therefore they are legit).. their writing is scattered and hard to follow. In some chapters they start discussing a philosophy by Sartre or Socrates, but thenthey don't seem go in depth and the chapter kind of drifts off with the feeling that it's unended.
Now... i'm not a philosophy buff so it could be that i simply don't see what they're implying, however they should make the reading of the passages more simplified, with more concrete example for us fans of the show. After all... we are not philosophers. I read the book twice, just to make sure I didn't miss anything.
Another gripe I had about this book is that they used the same 5 examples over and over in every chapter, which made it feel very washed out and boring. They should have chosen a broader range of examples from the books and movie.
Some of the passages WERE interesting, like the 1st chapter about choice. The author of that chapter really went into detail about choice, and what it means, and who gets to choose, and the different levels. Excellent JOB! It was also well written. Many chapters just sucked, like the author didn't see the show or read the books AT ALL.
Rather watch the show
Though I am a big fan of the series, I honestly wasn't a big fan of of the book. I guess I wasn't expecting something so utterly philosophical and educational. It read too much like a text book and with me not being in college anymore, I really didn't want to think that hard on the series.
I can imagine this would be a good book to use in an actual philosophy course in college. It would be a relateable topic for the youth of today!
True Blood and Philosophy--a good book for doing bad things
What makes this a useful book for approaching the Sookie Stackhouseverse is the editors centered the discussions around the Jace Everett song: by subtitling the work, "I wanna do bad things with you" they have clued us to the ethical arguments of their work, along with the novels and Television show.True Blood's popularity as an HBO show as well as Harris' rising star in the contemporary fantasy genre resulting from it, make a work that centers on the ethical, religious and philosophical conundrum an essential for anyone using either the TV show or one of the novels in the classroom.Students love to discuss the complexities of intellectual and moral ideas and True Blood abounds in both.Dunn and Housel's selection of essays will give anyone want to teach or learn what the depths these novels are a good jumping off place.It is not exhaustive in that the essays do not address all of the novels in the series to date but it does address the earlier novels as well as the first two seasons of the show.I would not be surprised if the editors create a companion volume in a few more years addressing the remaining novels; it would be a welcome companion in any library as is this book.
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