Your search for: subjects:"Death Social Aspects United States"

"This book is enormously important, beautifully reasoned and written with crystal clarity by an author of wide scholarly experience, brilliant insights and extraordinary erudition. It is the first book length study I've seen that reasons from the individual psychology of all stakeholders. It ...

"This book is enormously important, beautifully reasoned and written with crystal clarity by an author of wide scholarly experience, brilliant insights and extraordinary erudition. It is the first book length study I've seen that reasons from the individual psychology of all stakeholders. It ultimately provides the only truly revealing way to understand the personal and civic conundrums surrounding dying, which have always been characterized by irrational thinking, inconsistencies of behavior and paradoxes of personal viewpoints."--Sherwin Nuland, M.D., author of "How We Die

"Once you acknowledge the profound and inescapable ambivalence that shapes our attitudes toward death, what can we learn about our death-dealing policies and practices, from end-of-life care and assisted suicide to the death penalty? Robert Burt's "Death is That Man Taking Names provides extraordinary insights in eloquent and elegant prose. All thoughtful people who are seriously interested in the deeper roots and broader implications,of our policies concerning death should read this remarkably original and provocative book."--Thomas H. Murray, President, The Hastings Center, and author of "The Worth of a Child

Raising the Dead is a groundbreaking, interdisciplinary exploration of death's relation to subjectivity in twentieth-century American literature and culture. Sharon Patricia Holland contends that black subjectivity in particular is connected intimately to death. For Holland, travelling through "the ...

Raising the Dead is a groundbreaking, interdisciplinary exploration of death's relation to subjectivity in twentieth-century American literature and culture. Sharon Patricia Holland contends that black subjectivity in particular is connected intimately to death. For Holland, travelling through "the space of death" gives us, as cultural readers, a nuanced and appropriate metaphor for understanding what is at stake when bodies, discourses, and communities collide.

Holland argues that the presence of blacks, Native Americans, women, queers, and other "minorities" in society is, like death, "almost unspeakable". She gives voice to -- or raises -- the dead through her examination of works such as the movie Menace II Society, Toni Morrison's novel Beloved, Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead, Randall Kenan's A Visitation of Spirits, and the work of the all-white, male, feminist hip-hop band Consolidated. In challenging established methods of literary investigation by putting often-disparate voices in dialogue with each other, Holland forges connections among African-American literature and culture, queer and feminist theory.

Raising the Dead will be of interest to students and scholars of American culture, African-American literature, literary theory, gender studies, queer theory, and cultural studies.

Is death merely the cessation of life? Are our final years simply a wearing out of the body? Are hospitals and funeral homes--the bureaucratic machinery of death--capable of handling the profound spiritual dimension of dying? In The Last Passage, Donald Heinz offers wise answers to these questions ...

Is death merely the cessation of life? Are our final years simply a wearing out of the body? Are hospitals and funeral homes--the bureaucratic machinery of death--capable of handling the profound spiritual dimension of dying? In The Last Passage, Donald Heinz offers wise answers to these questions in a book that urges us to "recover a death of our own" and to view our final years as a fulfillment, a "last career." Despite the recent spate of books on death and dying, death remains a fact our culture tries desperately to ignore. In other times and in other cultures, preparing for death was seen as an important spiritual task--perhaps the most important task of our lives. Heinz argues that we can reconceive of death, reinvest it with meaning, and save it from becoming a meaningless biological event. Seeking appropriate models for such a reconstruction, Heinz offers a fascinating overview of the many ways death has been envisioned and ritualized throughout human history, from the Tibetan Book of the Dead to 15th century Christian ars moriendi--manuals on the art of dying--and from Jean Paul Sartre to Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. He also surveys the more recent contributions of psychologists, anthropologists, cultural critics, and death awareness advocates, whose efforts have largely failed to integrate death into a larger human story and the larger human community. Finally, Heinz shows us how we might create rituals through the use of music, visual arts, dance, drama, and language that would enable us to approach death with reverence, as the spiritual consummation of our lives.