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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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