A careful, moving investigation of existential matters told with a keen literary sense and memorable personal insights.
A wide-ranging book about the business of death.
Campbell has been fascinated by death since she watched her father, acclaimed comic book artist Eddie Campbell, create illustrations for Alan Moore’s From Hell. In her debut, Campbell works her way through the machinery of the death industry, interviewing morticians, embalmers, crime scene cleaners, executioners, and others. Clearly unafraid of getting her hands dirty, she chronicles how she held a brain during an autopsy and learned to dig a perfect hole from two cheery gravediggers. At a crematorium, she finds that “cancer is the last thing to burn.” This sounds bizarre and even a little ghoulish, but the author’s quest reveals a wealth of surprising grace and impressive courage. Most of the people she interviewed and shadowed are content in their roles, viewing their work as inherently important. “They are trying to do what they believe is right,” she writes. “They cannot reverse the situation and make people live again, but they can change how it is dealt with and give them dignity in death.” There are many touching moments and characters—e.g., a funeral home director who, in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, would secretly allow lovers and friends into the mortuary to say their goodbyes. Campbell’s encounter with a bereavement midwife, who specializes in stillbirths and deliveries of babies who will soon pass away, is strikingly poignant, as is the author’s admission that she will be haunted by the image of a dead child. Some of her interviewees understand what she means, noting that the atmosphere of death can leak into your soul. Nevertheless, the author concluded her journey with a greater understanding of life and death. She suggests that we should be willing to be more involved in the passage of loved ones, both for our own closure and as a recognition of the importance of life—sound advice in a remarkable book.
A careful, moving investigation of existential matters told with a keen literary sense and memorable personal insights.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-28184-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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SEEN & HEARD
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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