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 Inevitable Hour written by Emily K. Abel and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2013-05-01 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Changes in health care have dramatically altered the experience of dying in America. At the turn of the twentieth century, medicine’s imperative to cure disease increasingly took priority over the demand to relieve pain and suffering at the end of life. Filled with heartbreaking stories, The Inevitable Hour demonstrates that professional attention and resources gradually were diverted from dying patients. Emily K. Abel challenges three myths about health care and dying in America. First, that medicine has always sought authority over death and dying; second, that medicine superseded the role of families and spirituality at the end of life; and finally, that only with the advent of the high-tech hospital did an institutional death become dehumanized. Abel shows that hospitals resisted accepting dying patients and often worked hard to move them elsewhere. Poor, terminally ill patients, for example, were shipped from Bellevue Hospital in open boats across the East River to Blackwell’s Island, where they died in hovels, mostly without medical care. Some terminal patients were not forced to leave, yet long before the advent of feeding tubes and respirators, dying in a hospital was a profoundly dehumanizing experience. With technological advances, passage of the Social Security Act, and enactment of Medicare and Medicaid, almshouses slowly disappeared and conditions for dying patients improved—though, as Abel argues, the prejudices and approaches of the past are still with us. The problems that plagued nineteenth-century almshouses can be found in many nursing homes today, where residents often receive substandard treatment. A frank portrayal of the medical care of dying people past and present, The Inevitable Hour helps to explain why a movement to restore dignity to the dying arose in the early 1970s and why its goals have been so difficult to achieve.

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 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 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 Brief History of the Dead written by Kevin Brockmeier and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2006-02-14 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Kevin Brockmeier, one of this generation's most inventive young writers, comes a striking new novel about death, life, and the mysterious place in between. The City is inhabited by those who have departed Earth but are still remembered by the living. They will reside in this afterlife until they are completely forgotten. But the City is shrinking, and the residents clearing out. Some of the holdouts, like Luka Sims, who produces the City’s only newspaper, are wondering what exactly is going on. Others, like Coleman Kinzler, believe it is the beginning of the end. Meanwhile, Laura Byrd is trapped in an Antarctic research station, her supplies are running low, her radio finds only static, and the power is failing. With little choice, Laura sets out across the ice to look for help, but time is running out. Kevin Brockmeier alternates these two storylines to create a lyrical and haunting story about love, loss and the power of memory.

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 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 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 Amusing Ourselves to Death written by Neil Postman and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1986 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the effects of television culture on how we conduct our public affairs and how "entertainment values" corrupt the way we think.

Download or read book The Invention of Dying written by Brooke Biaz and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 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 BROOKE BIAZ (aka GRAEME HARPER) is a fiction writer, scriptwriter, and critic. Editor-in-chief of the international journal, NEW WRITING, he is a Professor of Creative Writing, Dean of The Honors College at Oakland University, Michigan, and an Honorary Professor in England. A former Commonwealth Scholar in Creative Writing, and a National Book Council award winner, he received the first doctorate in Creative Writing awarded in Australia. He was the inaugural Chair of the Higher Education Committee at the United Kingdom's National Association of Writers in Education (NAWE).

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 Loneliness of the Dying written by Norbert Elias and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2001-09-01 with total page 103 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1985, this is a short meditation by a great old man on people relating to other people who are dying, and the need for all of us to open up.