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
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
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