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
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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