Download or read book The Invention of Dying written by Brooke Biaz and published by Parlor Press LLC. This book was released on 2015-04-01 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A doctor, her bats, some remote islands, their expectant people: THE INVENTION OF DYING is a novel about human curiosity and reinvention; an exploration of the arrival of medicine where medicine has never been before, the discovery of possibilities for bright new life when confronted with the darkness of our own mortality. The Invention of Dying is all about the taming of death, one bold living day at a time. | “THE INVENTION OF DYING hums with a rare verbal and narrative energy. This is a book that will take you to places both real and imaginary that you’ve never been before. Its range is encyclopedic and the great comic spirit of Brooke Biaz is never far away.” —Jon Cook, Professor of Literature & Director of the Centre of Creative & Performing Arts at the University of East Anglia | “Brooke Biaz here presents a cleverly and even musically worded game, that plays with the relationship between medicine and death. In a day when perfectly healthy people are regularly made miserable by being told that they have “risk factors” and require intense, burdensome medical surveillance to ward off death—a death that will come eventually regardless—a way to shake up some of our ideas about the role of medicine, and even to imagine what life might be like without doctors or hospitals, is very timely.” | —Howard Brody, John P. McGovern Centennial Chair and Director, Institute for the Medical Humanities, The University of Texas Medical Branch |

Download or read book A Social History of Dying written by Allan Kellehear and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007-02-12 with total page 25 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our experiences of dying have been shaped by ancient ideas about death and social responsibility at the end of life. From Stone Age ideas about dying as otherworld journey to the contemporary Cosmopolitan Age of dying in nursing homes, Allan Kellehear takes the reader on a 2 million year journey of discovery that covers the major challenges we will all eventually face: anticipating, preparing, taming and timing for our eventual deaths. This book, first published in 2007, is a major review of the human and clinical sciences literature about human dying conduct. The historical approach of this book places our recent images of cancer dying and medical care in broader historical, epidemiological and global context. Professor Kellehear argues that we are witnessing a rise in shameful forms of dying. It is not cancer, heart disease or medical science that presents modern dying conduct with its greatest moral tests, but rather poverty, ageing and social exclusion.

Download or read book The Invention of Dying written by Brooke Biaz and published by . This book was released on 2015-07-01 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Things I ve Learned from Dying written by David R. Dow and published by Twelve. This book was released on 2014-01-07 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: National Book Critics Circle Award finalist David R. Dow confronts the reality of his work on death row when his father-in-law is diagnosed with lethal melanoma, his beloved Doberman becomes fatally ill, and his young son begins to comprehend the implications of mortality. "Every life is different, but every death is the same. We live with others. We die alone." In his riveting, artfully written memoir The Autobiography of an Execution, David Dow enraptured readers with a searing and frank exploration of his work defending inmates on death row. But when Dow's father-in-law receives his own death sentence in the form of terminal cancer, and his gentle dog Winona suffers acute liver failure, the author is forced to reconcile with death in a far more personal way, both as a son and as a father. Told through the disparate lenses of the legal battles he's spent a career fighting, and the intimate confrontations with death each family faces at home, Things I've Learned From Dyingoffers a poignant and lyrical account of how illness and loss can ravage a family. Full of grace and intelligence, Dow offers readers hope without cliche and reaffirms our basic human needs for acceptance and love by giving voice to the anguish we all face--as parents, as children, as partners, as friends--when our loved ones die tragically, and far too soon.

Download or read book The Invention of Hugo Cabret written by Brian Selznick and published by Scholastic. This book was released on 2015-09-03 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An orphan and thief, Hugo lives in the walls of a busy train station. He desperately believes a broken automaton will make his dreams come true. But when his world collides with an eccentric girl and a bitter old man, Hugo's undercover life are put in jeopardy. Turn the pages, follow the illustrations and enter an unforgettable new world!

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 This Republic of Suffering written by Drew Gilpin Faust and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2009-01-06 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • An "extraordinary ... profoundly moving" history (The New York Times Book Review) of the American Civil War that reveals the ways that death on such a scale changed not only individual lives but the life of the nation. An estiated 750,000 soldiers lost their lives in the American Civil War. An equivalent proportion of today's population would be seven and a half million. In This Republic of Suffering, Drew Gilpin Faust describes how the survivors managed on a practical level and how a deeply religious culture struggled to reconcile the unprecedented carnage with its belief in a benevolent God. Throughout, the voices of soldiers and their families, of statesmen, generals, preachers, poets, surgeons, nurses, northerners and southerners come together to give us a vivid understanding of the Civil War's most fundamental and widely shared reality. With a new introduction by the author, and a new foreword by Mike Mullen, 17th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Download or read book The Hour of Our Death written by Philippe Aries and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2013-11-06 with total page 697 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An “absolutely magnificent” book (The New Republic)—the fruit of almost two decades of study—that traces the changes in Western attitudes toward death and dying from the earliest Christian times to the present day. A truly landmark study, The Hour of Our Death reveals a pattern of gradually developing evolutionary stages in our perceptions of life in relation to death, each stage representing a virtual redefinition of human nature. Starting at the very foundations of Western culture, the eminent historian Phillipe Ariès shows how, from Graeco-Roman times through the first ten centuries of the Common Era, death was too common to be frightening; each life was quietly subordinated to the community, which paid its respects and then moved on. Ariès identifies the first major shift in attitude with the turn of the eleventh century when a sense of individuality began to rise and with it, profound consequences: death no longer meant merely the weakening of community, but rather the destruction of self. Hence the growing fear of the afterlife, new conceptions of the Last Judgment, and the first attempts (by Masses and other rituals) to guarantee a better life in the next world. In the 1500s attention shifted from the demise of the self to that of the loved one (as family supplants community), and by the nineteenth century death comes to be viewed as simply a staging post toward reunion in the hereafter. Finally, Ariès shows why death has become such an unendurable truth in our own century—how it has been nearly banished from our daily lives—and points out what may be done to “re-tame” this secret terror. The richness of Ariès's source material and investigative work is breathtaking. While exploring everything from churches, religious rituals, and graveyards (with their often macabre headstones and monuments), to wills and testaments, love letters, literature, paintings, diaries, town plans, crime and sanitation reports, and grave robbing complaints, Aries ranges across Europe to Russia on the one hand and to England and America on the other. As he sorts out the tangled mysteries of our accumulated terrors and beliefs, we come to understand the history—indeed the pathology—of our intellectual and psychological tensions in the face of death.

Download or read book The Invention of Death written by Hubert Aquin and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book In My Time of Dying written by John Parker and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-16 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An in-depth look at how mortuary cultures and issues of death and the dead in Africa have developed over four centuries In My Time of Dying is the first detailed history of death and the dead in Africa south of the Sahara. Focusing on a region that is now present-day Ghana, John Parker explores mortuary cultures and the relationship between the living and the dead over a four-hundred-year period spanning the seventeenth to twentieth centuries. Parker considers many questions from the African historical perspective, including why people die and where they go after death, how the dead are buried and mourned to ensure they continue to work for the benefit of the living, and how perceptions and experiences of death and the ends of life have changed over time. From exuberant funeral celebrations encountered by seventeenth-century observers to the brilliantly conceived designer coffins of the late twentieth century, Parker shows that the peoples of Ghana have developed one of the world’s most vibrant cultures of death. He explores the unfolding background of that culture through a diverse range of issues, such as the symbolic power of mortal remains and the dominion of hallowed ancestors, as well as the problem of bad deaths, vile bodies, and vengeful ghosts. Parker reconstructs a vast timeline of death and the dead, from the era of the slave trade to the coming of Christianity and colonial rule to the rise of the modern postcolonial nation. With an array of written and oral sources, In My Time of Dying richly adds to an understanding of how the dead continue to weigh on the shoulders of the living.

Download or read book Death American Style written by Lawrence R. Samuel and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2013-07-05 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DEATH, AMERICAN STYLE: A CULTURAL HISTORY OF DYING IN AMERICA is the first comprehensive cultural history to explore America’s uneasy relationship with death over the past century.

Download or read book This Mortal Coil written by Andrew Doig and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-01-19 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A GUARDIAN, ECONOMIST AND PROSPECT BOOK OF THE YEAR'A superb book' Simon Sebag Montefiore'An empowering story of human ingenuity' Economist'Full of curious facts' The TimesCauses of death have changed irrevocably across time. In the course of a few centuries we have gone from a world where disease or violence were likely to strike anyone at any age, and where famine could be just one bad harvest away, to one where in many countries excess food is more of a problem than a lack of it. Why have the reasons we die changed so much? How is it that a century ago people died mainly from infectious disease, while today the leading causes of death in industrialised nations are heart disease and stroke? And what do changing causes of death reveal about how previous generations have lived? University of Manchester Professor Andrew Doig provides an eye-opening portrait of death throughout history, looking at particular causes - from infectious disease to genetic disease, violence to diet - who they affected, and the people who made it possible to overcome them. Along the way we hear about the long and torturous story of the discovery of vitamin C and its role in preventing scurvy; the Irish immigrant who opened the first washhouse for the poor of Liverpool, and in so doing educated the public on the importance of cleanliness in combating disease; and the Church of England curate who, finding his new church equipped with a telephone, started the Samaritans to assist those in emotional distress. This Mortal Coil is a thrilling story of growing medical knowledge and social organisation, of achievement and, looking to the future, of promise.

Download or read book Spiritual Literacy written by Frederic Brussat and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1998-08-05 with total page 612 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection presents "more than 650 readings about daily life from present-day authors ..."--Inside jacket flap.

Download or read book The Brief History of the Dead written by Kevin Brockmeier and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2011-07-21 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'A prodigy of imagination, insight and overwhelming tenderness' Independent 'Remember me when I'm gone' just took on a whole new meaning . . . Laura Byrd is in trouble. Three weeks ago she and her friends found themselves alone in one of the coldest, most remote places on earth. Her friends set out in search of help, and now Laura realises that they are not coming back. So she gathers her remaining supplies and sets out on an extraordinary journey. Meanwhile in another city, more and more people arrive every day. Each has a different story to tell, but their accounts have one thing in common - it was their final journey. For this is the city of the dead. And the link between this city and Laura's journey lies at the heart of this remarkable novel. The Brief History of the Dead tells a magical story about our lives - about our place in the world, our connections with each other, and what happens to us all after our deaths. It is a story of spellbinding power and imagination, which resonates long after the final page.

Download or read book The Work of the Dead written by Thomas W. Laqueur and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-08 with total page 736 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The meaning of our concern for mortal remains—from antiquity through the twentieth century The Greek philosopher Diogenes said that when he died his body should be tossed over the city walls for beasts to scavenge. Why should he or anyone else care what became of his corpse? In The Work of the Dead, acclaimed cultural historian Thomas Laqueur examines why humanity has universally rejected Diogenes's argument. No culture has been indifferent to mortal remains. Even in our supposedly disenchanted scientific age, the dead body still matters—for individuals, communities, and nations. A remarkably ambitious history, The Work of the Dead offers a compelling and richly detailed account of how and why the living have cared for the dead, from antiquity to the twentieth century. The book draws on a vast range of sources—from mortuary archaeology, medical tracts, letters, songs, poems, and novels to painting and landscapes in order to recover the work that the dead do for the living: making human communities that connect the past and the future. Laqueur shows how the churchyard became the dominant resting place of the dead during the Middle Ages and why the cemetery largely supplanted it during the modern period. He traces how and why since the nineteenth century we have come to gather the names of the dead on great lists and memorials and why being buried without a name has become so disturbing. And finally, he tells how modern cremation, begun as a fantasy of stripping death of its history, ultimately failed—and how even the ashes of the victims of the Holocaust have been preserved in culture. A fascinating chronicle of how we shape the dead and are in turn shaped by them, this is a landmark work of cultural history.

Download or read book The Invention of Celebrity written by Antoine Lilti and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2017-09-05 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Frequently perceived as a characteristic of modern culture, the phenomenon of celebrity has much older roots. In this book Antoine Lilti shows that the mechanisms of celebrity were developed in Europe during the Enlightenment, well before films, yellow journalism, and television, and then flourished during the Romantic period on both sides of the Atlantic. Figures from across the arts like Voltaire, Garrick, and Liszt were all veritable celebrities in their time, arousing curiosity and passionate loyalty from their “fans.” The rise of the press, new advertising techniques, and the marketing of leisure brought a profound transformation in the visibility of celebrities: private lives were now very much on public show. Nor was politics spared this cultural upheaval: Marie-Antoinette, George Washington, and Napoleon all experienced a political world transformed by the new demands of celebrity. And when the people suddenly appeared on the revolutionary scene, it was no longer enough to be legitimate; it was crucial to be popular too. Lilti retraces the profound social upheaval precipitated by the rise of celebrity and explores the ambivalence felt toward this new phenomenon. Both sought after and denounced, celebrity evolved as the modern form of personal prestige, assuming the role that glory played in the aristocratic world in a new age of democracy and evolving forms of media. While uncovering the birth of celebrity in the eighteenth century, Lilti's perceptive history at the same time shines light on the continuing importance of this phenomenon in today’s world.

Download or read book The Black Book of Communism written by Stéphane Courtois and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 920 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This international bestseller plumbs recently opened archives in the former Soviet bloc to reveal the accomplishments of communism around the world. The book is the first attempt to catalogue and analyse the crimes of communism over 70 years.