Download or read book Death Is a Festival written by João José Reis and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2003-11-20 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This award-winning social history of death and funeral rites during the early decades of Brazil's independence from Portugal focuses on the Cemiterada movement in Salvador, capital of the province of Bahia. The book opens with a lively account of the popular riot that ensued when, in 1836, the government condemned the traditional burial of bodies inside Catholic church buildings and granted a private company a monopoly over burials. This episode is used by Reis to examine the customs of death and burial in Bahian society, explore the economic and religious conflicts behind the move for funerary reforms and the maintenance of traditional rituals of dying, and understand how people dealt with new concerns sparked by modernization and science. Viewing culture within its social context, he illuminates the commonalities and differences that shaped death and its rituals for rich and poor, men and women, slaves and masters, adults and children, foreigners and Brazilians. This translation makes the book, originally published in Brazil in 1993, available in English for the first time.
Download or read book Death is a Festival written by João José Reis and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This award-winning social history of death and funeral rites during the early decades of Brazil's independence from Portugal focuses on the Cemiterada movement in Salvador, capital of the province of Bahia. The book opens with a lively account of the popu
Download or read book The Death and Life of the Great Lakes written by Dan Egan and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2017-03-07 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Times Bestseller Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize Winner of the J. Anthony Lukas Award "Nimbly splices together history, science, reporting and personal experiences into a taut and cautiously hopeful narrative.… Egan’s book is bursting with life (and yes, death)." —Robert Moor, New York Times Book Review The Great Lakes—Erie, Huron, Michigan, Ontario, and Superior—hold 20 percent of the world’s supply of surface fresh water and provide sustenance, work, and recreation for tens of millions of Americans. But they are under threat as never before, and their problems are spreading across the continent. The Death and Life of the Great Lakes is prize-winning reporter Dan Egan’s compulsively readable portrait of an ecological catastrophe happening right before our eyes, blending the epic story of the lakes with an examination of the perils they face and the ways we can restore and preserve them for generations to come.
Download or read book This Party s Dead written by Erica Buist and published by Unbound Publishing. This book was released on 2021-02-18 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What if we responded to death... by throwing a party? By the time Erica Buist’s father-in-law Chris was discovered, upstairs in his bed, his book resting on his chest, he had been dead for over a week. She searched for answers (the artery-clogging cheeses in his fridge?) and tried to reason with herself (does daughter-in-law even feature in the grief hierarchy?) and eventually landed on an inevitable, uncomfortable truth: everybody dies. While her husband maintained a semblance of grace and poise, Erica found herself consumed by her grief, descending into a bout of pyjama-clad agoraphobia, stalking friends online to ascertain whether any of them had also dropped dead without warning, unable to extract herself from the spiral of death anxiety... until one day she decided to reclaim control. With Mexico’s Day of the Dead festivities as a starting point, Erica decided to confront death head-on by visiting seven death festivals around the world – one for every day they didn’t find Chris. From Mexico to Nepal, Sicily, Thailand, Madagascar, Japan and finally Indonesia – with a stopover in New Orleans, where the dead outnumber the living ten to one – Erica searched for the answers to both fundamental and unexpected questions around death anxiety. This Party’s Deadis the account of her journey to understand how other cultures deal with mortal terror, how they move past the knowledge that they’re going to die in order to live happily day-to-day, how they celebrate rather than shy away from the topic of death – and how when this openness and acceptance are passed down through the generations, death suddenly doesn’t seem so scary after all.
Download or read book Another Day in the Death of America written by Gary Younge and published by Bold Type Books. This book was released on 2016-10-04 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2017 J. Anthony Lukas PrizeShortlisted for the 2017 Hurston/Wright Foundation AwardFinalist for the 2017 Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in JournalismLonglisted for the 2017 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Non Fiction On an average day in America, seven children and teens will be shot dead. In Another Day in the Death of America, award-winning journalist Gary Younge tells the stories of the lives lost during one such day. It could have been any day, but he chose November 23, 2013. Black, white, and Latino, aged nine to nineteen, they fell at sleepovers, on street corners, in stairwells, and on their own doorsteps. From the rural Midwest to the barrios of Texas, the narrative crisscrosses the country over a period of twenty-four hours to reveal the full human stories behind the gun-violence statistics and the brief mentions in local papers of lives lost. This powerful and moving work puts a human face-a child's face-on the "collateral damage" of gun deaths across the country. This is not a book about gun control, but about what happens in a country where it does not exist. What emerges in these pages is a searing and urgent portrait of youth, family, and firearms in America today.
Download or read book The Art of Death written by Edwidge Danticat and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2017-07-11 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A moving reflection on a subject that touches us all, by the bestselling author of Claire of the Sea Light Edwidge Danticat’s The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story is at once a personal account of her mother dying from cancer and a deeply considered reckoning with the ways that other writers have approached death in their own work. “Writing has been the primary way I have tried to make sense of my losses,” Danticat notes in her introduction. “I have been writing about death for as long as I have been writing.” The book moves outward from the shock of her mother’s diagnosis and sifts through Danticat’s writing life and personal history, all the while shifting fluidly from examples that range from Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude to Toni Morrison’s Sula. The narrative, which continually circles the many incarnations of death from individual to large-scale catastrophes, culminates in a beautiful, heartrending prayer in the voice of Danticat’s mother. A moving tribute and a work of astute criticism, The Art of Death is a book that will profoundly alter all who encounter it.
Download or read book Festival Days written by Jo Ann Beard and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2021-03-16 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A searing and exhilarating new collection from the award-winning author of The Boys of My Youth and In Zanesville,who “honors the beautiful, the sacred, and the comic in life” (Sigrid Nunez, National Book Award winner for The Friend). A New York Times Notable Book A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice A Boston Globe and LitHub Best Book of the Year When “The Fourth State of Matter,” her now famous piece about a workplace massacre at the University of Iowa was published in The New Yorker, Jo Ann Beard immediately became one of the most influential writers in America, forging a path for a new generation of young authors willing to combine the dexterity of fiction with the rigors of memory and reportage, and in the process extending the range of possibility for the essay form. Now, with Festival Days, Beard brings us the culmination of her groundbreaking work. In these nine pieces, she captures both the small, luminous moments of daily existence and those instants when life and death hang in the balance, ranging from the death of a beloved dog to a relentlessly readable account of a New York artist trapped inside a burning building, as well as two triumphant, celebrated pieces of short fiction. Here is an unforgettable collection destined to be embraced and debated by readers and writers, teachers and students. Anchored by the title piece––a searing journey through India that brings into focus questions of mortality and love—Festival Days presents Beard at the height of her powers, using her flawless prose to reveal all that is tender and timeless beneath the way we live now.
Download or read book From Here to Eternity Traveling the World to Find the Good Death written by Caitlin Doughty and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2017-10-03 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times and Los Angeles Times Bestseller “Doughty chronicles [death] practices with tenderheartedness, a technician’s fascination, and an unsentimental respect for grief.” —Jill Lepore, The New Yorker Fascinated by our pervasive fear of dead bodies, mortician Caitlin Doughty embarks on a global expedition to discover how other cultures care for the dead. From Zoroastrian sky burials to wish-granting Bolivian skulls, she investigates the world’s funerary customs and expands our sense of what it means to treat the dead with dignity. Her account questions the rituals of the American funeral industry—especially chemical embalming—and suggests that the most effective traditions are those that allow mourners to personally attend to the body of the deceased. Exquisitely illustrated by artist Landis Blair, From Here to Eternity is an adventure into the morbid unknown, a fascinating tour through the unique ways people everywhere confront mortality.
Download or read book Sex Death and Witchcraft written by Douglas Ezzy and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2014-05-22 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Faunalia is a controversial Pagan festival with a reputation for being wild and emotionally intense. It lasts five days, 80 people attend, and the two main rituals run most of the night. In the tantalisingly erotic Baphomet rite, participants encounter a hermaphroditic deity, enter a state of trance and dance naked around a bonfire. In the Underworld rite participants role play their own death, confronting grief and suffering. These rituals are understood as "shadow work" - a Jungian term that refers to practices that creatively engage repressed or hidden aspects of the self. Sex, Death and Witchcraft is a powerful application of relational theory to the study of religion and contemporary culture. It analyses Faunalia's rituals in terms of recent innovations in the sociology of religion and religious studies that focus on relational etiquette, lived religion, embodiment and performance. The sensuous and emotionally intense ritual performances at Faunalia transform both moral orientations and self-understandings. Participants develop an ethical practice that is individualistic, but also relational, and aesthetically mediated. Extensive extracts from interviews describe the rituals in participants' own words. The book combines rich and evocative description of the rituals with careful analysis of the social processes that shape people's experiences at this controversial Pagan festival.
Download or read book A Good Goodbye Funeral Planning for Those Who Don t Plan to Die written by Gail Rubin and published by . This book was released on 2010-11 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rubin provides the information, inspiration, and tools to plan and implement creative, meaningful, and memorable end-of-life rituals for people and pets.
Download or read book The Forgiveness to Come written by Peter Jason Banki and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2017-11-07 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is concerned with the aporias, or impasses, of forgiveness, especially in relation to the legacy of the crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Nazis and their collaborators during World War II. Banki argues that, while forgiveness of the Holocaust is and will remain impossible, we cannot rest upon that impossibility. Rather, the impossibility of forgiveness must be thought in another way. In an epoch of “worldwidization,” we may not be able simply to escape the violence of scenes and rhetoric that repeatedly portray apology, reconciliation, and forgiveness as accomplishable acts. Accompanied by Jacques Derrida’s thought of forgiveness of the unforgivable, and its elaboration in relation to crimes against humanity, the book undertakes close readings of literary, philosophical, and cinematic texts by Simon Wiesenthal, Jean Améry, Vladimir Jankélévitch, Robert Antelme and Eva Mozes Kor. These texts contend with the idea that the crimes of the Nazis are inexpiable, that they lie beyond any possible atonement or repair. Banki argues that the juridical concept of crimes against humanity calls for a thought of forgiveness—one that would not imply closure of the infinite wounds of the past. How could such a forgiveness be thought or dreamed? Banki shows that if today we cannot simply escape the “worldwidization” of forgiveness, then it is necessary to rethink what forgiveness is, the conditions under which it supposedly takes place, and especially its relation to justice.
Download or read book Halloween and Other Festivals of Death and Life written by Jack Santino and published by Univ. of Tennessee Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: However, the essays in this volume also suggest that there is something ironic and unsettling about the immense popularity of a holiday whose main images are of death, evil, and the grotesque. Halloween and Other Festivals of Death and Life is a unique contribution that questions our concepts of religiosity and spirituality while contributing to our understanding of Halloween as a rich and diverse reflection of our society's past, present, and future identity.
Download or read book Death s Summer Coat written by Brandy Schillace and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-01-15 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Death is something we all confront—it touches our families, our homes, our hearts. And yet we have grown used to denying its existence, treating it as an enemy to be beaten back with medical advances.We are living at a unique point in human history. People are living longer than ever, yet the longer we live, the more taboo and alien our mortality becomes. Yet we, and our loved ones, still remain mortal. People today still struggle with this fact, as we have done throughout our entire history. What led us to this point? What drove us to sanitize death and make it foreign and unfamiliar?Schillace shows how talking about death, and the rituals associated with it, can help provide answers. It also brings us closer together—conversation and community are just as important for living as for dying. Some of the stories are strikingly unfamiliar; others are far more familiar than you might suppose. But all reveal much about the present—and about ourselves.
Download or read book Funeral Festivals in America written by Jacqueline S. Thursby and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2014-07-11 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Evelyn Waugh wrote The Loved One (1948) as a satire of the elaborate preparations and memorialization of the dead taking place in his time, he had no way of knowing how technical and extraordinarily creative human funerary practices would become in the ensuing decades. In Funeral Festivals in America, author Jacqueline S. Thursby explores how modern American funerals and their accompanying rituals have evolved into affairs that help the living with the healing process. Thursby suggests that there is irony in the festivities surrounding death. The typical American response to death often develops into a celebration that reestablishes links or strengthens ties between family members and friends. The increasingly important funerary banquet, for example, honors an often well-lived life in order to help survivors accept the change that death brings and to provide healing fellowship. At such celebrations and other forms of the traditional wake, participants often use humor to add another dimension to expressing both the personality of the deceased and their ties to a particular ethnic heritage. In her research and interviews, Thursby discovered the paramount importance of food as part of the funeral ritual. During times of loss, individuals want to be consoled, and this is often accomplished through the preparation and consumption of nourishing, comforting foods. In the Intermountain West, Funeral Potatoes, a potato-cheese casserole, has become an expectation at funeral meals; Muslim families often bring honey flavored fruits and vegetables to the funeral table for their consoling familiarity; and many Mexican Americans continue the tradition of tamale making as a way to bring people together to talk, to share memories, and to simply enjoy being together. Funeral Festivals in America examines rituals for loved ones separated by death, frivolities surrounding death, funeral foods and feasts, post-funeral rites, and personalized memorials and grave markers. Thursby concludes that though Americans come from many different cultural traditions, they deal with death in a largely similar approach. They emphasize unity and embrace rites that soothe the distress of death as a way to heal and move forward.
Download or read book The Festival of Bones El Festival de Las Calaveras written by Luis San Vicente and published by . This book was released on 2014-09-23 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thirty thousand hardbacks sold On Mexico's Day of the Dead, the skeletons jump for sheer joy. And no wonder: they've been cooped up the whole year and now they're ready to party. Watch the calaveras shake, rattle, and roll as they celebrate the biggest event of the graveyard's social calendar
Download or read book Dinosaur Vs the Potty written by Bob Shea and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Mrs Death Misses Death written by Salena Godden and published by Canongate Books. This book was released on 2021-01-28 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: SHORTLISTED FOR THE GORDON BURN PRIZE Mrs Death tells her intoxicating story in this life-affirming fire-starter of a novel Mrs Death has had enough. She is exhausted by her job and now seeks someone to unburden her conscience to. She meets Wolf, a troubled young writer, who – enthralled by her stories – begins to write Mrs Death’s memoirs. As the two reflect on the losses they have experienced (or facilitated), their friendship flourishes. All the while, despite her world-weariness, Death must continue to hold humans’ fates in her hands, appearing in our lives when we least expect her . . .
