Tag: death

So you’ve got a corpse. What now?

In one of the more interesting (and probably weirder) books we’ve added to the collection recently, Norman Cantor’s After We Die: The Life and Times of the Human Cadaver explores the trip of dead human bodies from end of life through into the ground. Find out what sort of social practices, legal processes, and other fun things get applied to bodies after their primary function has ceased.

It’s a morbidly interesting trip through our customs, medical, and legal systems to find out the rules for cadavers. Recommended for pre-med, pre-law, or anyone else. It’s actually pretty interesting!

A Sobering Book of the Day

The mass killings carried out by the Nazi party and their allies during World War II are horrific.  The impact certainly overshadowed other mass killings carried out by regimes in the 20th Century, but Benjamin A. Valentino is out to make sure these tragedies and their lessons do not go unnoticed.  His book, Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the 20th Century, looks at all of the different places where, by his definition, at least 50,000 people are killed in a 5 year period. A brief list of mass killings:

  • Soviet Union
  • China
  • Cambodia
  • Nazi Germany
  • Armenia
  • Rwanda
  • Soviet occupation of Afghanistan
  • Guatemala

And there are probably more.  This book provides a new look at the brutality of the 20th Century, but contains lessons one should remember.

BotD: Continuing on Our Cheery Path

Julian Barnes is a critically acclaimed author, and a writer of many novels, 10 of which we own.  This latest book, however, is a set of Barnes’s musings on death.  Yes, death.  Because we can’t stop with the uppers around here.  But as the title implies, it is Nothing to Be Frightened Of.  The author’s fascination with the subject goes from awkward to reassuring and back. As interesting as it is, you may want to pick up another item we just added to balance out the mood…

1.21 gigawatts? Great Scott!

Book of the Day (2008 – )

Fact: My mom’s parents made tombstones for a living, and her family friends were in the funeral home business.  My mom was one of those people who could watch Six Feet Under without blinking. I think because of this, I’ve always been around death, and have only seen it on an intimate level for families.  In perusing for today’s BotD, I noticed Beyond the Good Death: The Anthropology of Modern Dying by James W. Green.  Here’s a quick blurb from inside the bookjacket:

Death is political, as the controversies surrounding Jack Kevorkian and, more recently, Terri Schiavo have shown.  While death is a natural event, modern end-of-life-experiences are shaped by new medical, demographic, and cultural trends.

Beyond Good Death takes a look at the factors in what people consider a “good death” or a “bad death”, whether it be heroic, peaceful, or an ethical madhouse, and peers into the evolution of societies that shape our modern views on one of the few inevitable events in life. Regardless of one’s own views, it provides an interesting dissection of why we think what we think when the end arrives.