Paul McDonald

The book takes you on a journey through various theories of humour from the psychological to the sociological. The book is an introduction to the field and an overview as well, but where the book is lacking in depth it makes up for this in being one of the few of its kind.
Humour studies, in my opinion, is a highly underrated interdisciplinary academic discipline that crosses many boundaries and this book gave me the clearest picture of what opportunities lie beyond a simple laugh. It was on the basis of this book that I decided that as far as solving humanity's most serious problems, humour of a certain kind may well be the magic disruptive ingredient.… (plus d'informations)

Dave McVane, a talentless alcoholic hack (aren't all reporters for local papers?) from the Walsall weekly rag and the anti-hero and narrator of the story, is an irritating twat of a creation - so much so that one is tempted to give the novel up as a bad deal. It's debateable whether it gradually gets better or whether the reader begins to appreciate that McVane IS a twat because anyone who lives in Walsall is going to end up a twat even if they don't start out as one. Either way the reader is sucked into a story which turns out to be generally entertaining without threatening to set the world ablaze.

And it does put one off relocating to Walsall. Redditch is crying out for an equivalent treatment.

But this is a local (Walsall) novel written by a local (Walsall) author published by a local (Birmingham) publisher, and supporting regional voices in literature is a Good Thing.

If you're wondering about the title, "Kiss Me Softly, Amy Turtle" is the safe or escape phrase used in the S&M brothel which features in the first half of the novel - Amy Turtle herself having originally been a character in Crossroads, an amateurish and utterly dreadful Midlands-based and produced soap of the 1970s and early 1980s.… (plus d'informations)