A scholarly, well-researched work that assumes, even demands, a strong interest in contemporary English-language literature.
Cross-disciplinary study of the ways that shifts in cultural attitudes and beliefs have altered how death is mourned and the dead memorialized.
Gilbert (English/Univ. of Calif., Davis) has previously written on this subject from a personal perspective (Wrongful Death, 1995) and from a literary one (Inventions of Farewell, 2001). Here she combines autobiographical narrative and literary criticism with anthropological, cultural and sociological studies to give a broader, more complex picture. After the terrorist attacks of 2001, her academic study of the contemporary elegy evolved into a more general study of dying, death, bereavement and mourning in Western cultures. Personal experiences open each chapter in Part One, “Arranging My Mourning,” which considers such universal aspects of death as grief, widowhood, memorials and the desire to communicate with the dead. In Part Two, “History Makes Death,” Gilbert turns to the work of anthropologists, sociologists and historians, but also uses personal stories, the music of Brahms and the writings of Evelyn Waugh and Jessica Mitford as tools. This section examines changes in attitudes towards death and in the rituals and language associated with it; the effects of 20th-century technologies on everything from genocide to hospital-managed dying; and the documentation of death through film and still photography. Part Three, “The Handbook of Heartbreak,” appears to be the core of her original literary study on the poetics of grief. Here the author focuses on how modern poets express confusion, anxiety and distress over death. While it is filled with numerous excerpts from, and analysis of, the works of 20th-century American and British poets, Gilbert ventures beyond the written word to consider the effects of the horrifying images of 9/11, attempts by bereaved individuals to find closure, hastily improvised public memorials and the World Trade Center memorial design as a reflection of the absence and blankness now associated with the end of life.
A scholarly, well-researched work that assumes, even demands, a strong interest in contemporary English-language literature.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-393-05131-5
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2005
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
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
