No deep excavations into the mysteries of human demise here, but shovelfuls of intriguing tidbits for anyone curious about...
An amusing if grisly compendium of everything we never wished to know about mortuaries, cemeteries, and other less savory aspects of the Big Casino.
Anne Rice biographer Ramsland (Prism of the Night, 1991) seems hell-bent to corner the literary market on all things ghoulish yet true (see Ghost, below), but her chipper inquisitiveness seems incongruous in depicting “Strange Embalmings,” famous disinterments, the occasional rogue funeral home that treats clients as “a side of beef rather than a person,” and the like. Still, her enthusiasm knits together wide-ranging topics that feel more anecdotal than narrative. Noting that her introduction to the industry “was through scary movies like The Comedy of Terrors [with] Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, and Boris Karloff,” she is intrigued by the wholesome sensitivity and respect for tradition of the funeral directors she meets from firms including the online Electronic Funeral Service Association; the Upper East Side’s Frank E. Campbell Funeral Home, which since 1898 has originated many funerary customs; and a small-town Ohio establishment whose proprietors continue the disappearing tradition of living onsite: “[I] could just imagine the children . . . fantasizing about corpses and ghosts.” Although Ramsland touches on sensitive social issues relating to the changing face of death, such as the controversial purchase by conglomerates like Service Corporation International of many independent funeral homes and the discreet rise of for-profit cemeteries, her personal predilections seem to lead her towards the juicier pulp details. She adeptly locates these within history and culture, so that, for example, Poe’s work informs discussion of premature burial, sufficiently feared in the 19th century to inspire alarm-equipped coffins. Her depictions of such notorious postmortems as those of Lenin and Eva Perón add more depth to sections on autopsies and embalming, and she offers memorable examples of the tapophile’s (that is, gravestone fanatic’s) obsessions, like hard-to-find slave cemeteries and the alleged Parisian gravesite of Jim Morrison.
No deep excavations into the mysteries of human demise here, but shovelfuls of intriguing tidbits for anyone curious about what begins when life ends.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-018518-X
Page Count: 256
Publisher: HarperEntertainment
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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