Surprisingly easy reading on a usually dark topic and fine preparation for anyone preparing to launch or simply attend a...
A wide-ranging, user-friendly attempt to make death an acceptable, even comfortable, topic of ordinary conversation.
Cultural historian Schillace (Medical History/Case Western Reserve Univ.), managing editor of the health journal Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, believes that by learning about the practices associated with death and dying in other cultures and in earlier times, we can approach our mortality with less fear. In contrast to the medicalization of death in today’s Western world, the author presents various rituals and cultural customs, including Tibetan Buddhist sky burials and Victorian memento mori photography, as ways of keeping the bereaved connected to the deceased. She skims lightly through centuries of history, touching on the replacement of priests by physicians at the deathbed, the impact of medieval plagues, and the role of body snatchers in medical education. Schillace partly compensates for the shallowness of the history with numerous unusual and fascinating black-and-white illustrations that feature corpses, skeletons, medical students, gravestones, and grieving mothers. Later in the narrative, the author turns to how death is managed in the contemporary West, how rituals have been devalued, how the dying have been hidden away from sight in hospitals, and how the disposal of the dead is managed by funeral directors. “Perhaps compassion works best in collaboration….Death need not be a solo affair,” writes the author. “It can be communal, and is perhaps best approached in just that way.” She writes glowingly of a growing movement to counter the death-denying attitude of Western society: the emergence of Death Salons and Death Cafes, in which ordinary people, not necessarily the bereaved, come together to talk openly and freely about death, to ask questions, and to share ideas—to have a conversation about death.
Surprisingly easy reading on a usually dark topic and fine preparation for anyone preparing to launch or simply attend a Death Salon or Cafe.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-78396-040-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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