American Afterlife

Author : Kate Sweeney
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
ISBN 13 : 0820346896
Total Pages : 232 pages
Book Rating : 4.92/5 ( download)

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Download or read book American Afterlife written by Kate Sweeney and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2014-03-15 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An award-winning writer explores the patchwork American cultural history of grieving the departed. One family inters their matriarch’s ashes on the floor of the ocean. Another holds a memorial weenie roast each year at a green-burial cemetery. An 1898 ad for embalming fluid promises, “You can make mummies with it!” while a leading contemporary burial vault is touted as impervious to the elements. A grieving mother, 150 years ago, might spend her days tending a garden at her daughter’s grave. Today, she might tend the roadside memorial she erected where her daughter was killed. One mother wears a locket containing her daughter’s hair; the other, a necklace containing her ashes. What happens after someone dies depends on our personal stories and on where those stories fall in a larger tale―that of death in America. It’s a powerful tale that we usually keep hidden from our everyday lives until we have to face it. American Afterlife by Kate Sweeney reveals this world through a collective portrait of Americans past and present who are personally involved with death: obit writers in the desert, an Atlantic funeral voyage, a fourth-generation funeral director―even a midwestern museum that shows us our death-obsessed Victorian progenitors. Each story illuminates details in another, revealing a landscape that feels at once strange and familiar, one that’s by turns odd, tragic, poignant, and sometimes even funny. “Sweeney’s quest for the “why” behind mourning rituals has given us a book in the best tradition of narrative journalism.”—Jessica Handler, author of Braving the Fire: A Guide to Writing about Grief and Loss

Author : Shannon Lee Dawdy
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 0691254702
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.08/5 ( download)

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Download or read book American Afterlives written by Shannon Lee Dawdy and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2023-12-12 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A mesmerizing trip across America to investigate the changing face of death in contemporary life Death in the United States is undergoing a quiet revolution. You can have your body frozen, dissected, composted, dissolved, or tanned. Your family can incorporate your remains into jewelry, shotgun shells, paperweights, and artwork. Cremations have more than doubled, and DIY home funerals and green burials are on the rise. American Afterlives is Shannon Lee Dawdy’s lyrical and compassionate account of changing death practices in America as people face their own mortality and search for a different kind of afterlife. As an anthropologist and archaeologist, Dawdy knows that how a society treats its dead yields powerful clues about its beliefs and values. As someone who has experienced loss herself, she knows there is no way to tell this story without also reexamining her own views about death and dying. In this meditative and gently humorous book, Dawdy embarks on a transformative journey across the United States, talking to funeral directors, death-care entrepreneurs, designers, cemetery owners, death doulas, and ordinary people from all walks of life. What she discovers is that, by reinventing death, Americans are reworking their ideas about personhood, ritual, and connection across generations. She also confronts the seeming contradiction that American death is becoming at the same time more materialistic and more spiritual. Written in conjunction with a documentary film project, American Afterlives features images by cinematographer Daniel Zox that provide their own testament to our rapidly changing attitudes toward death and the afterlife.

Author : Emma Anderson
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674727177
Total Pages : 411 pages
Book Rating : 4.75/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Death and Afterlife of the North American Martyrs written by Emma Anderson and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2013-11-18 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1640s--a decade of epidemic and warfare across colonial North America--eight Jesuit missionaries met their deaths at the hands of native antagonists. With their collective canonization in 1930, these men, known to the devout as the North American martyrs, would become the continent's first official Catholic saints. In The Death and Afterlife of the North American Martyrs, Emma Anderson untangles the complexities of these seminal acts of violence and their ever-changing legacy across the centuries. While exploring how Jesuit missionaries perceived their terrifying final hours, the work also seeks to comprehend the motivations of the those who confronted them from the other side of the axe, musket, or caldron of boiling water, and to illuminate the experiences of those native Catholics who, though they died alongside their missionary mentors, have yet to receive comparable recognition as martyrs by the Catholic Church. In tracing the creation and evolution of the cult of the martyrs across the centuries, Anderson reveals the ways in which both believers and detractors have honored and preserved the memory of the martyrs in this "afterlife," and how their powerful story has been continually reinterpreted in the collective imagination over the centuries. As rival shrines rose to honor the martyrs on either side of the U.S.-Canadian border, these figures would both unite and deeply divide natives and non-natives, francophones and anglophones, Protestants and Catholics, Canadians and Americans, forging a legacy as controversial as it has been enduring.

Author : Drew Gilpin Faust
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0375703837
Total Pages : 385 pages
Book Rating : 4.36/5 ( download)

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Download or read book This Republic of Suffering written by Drew Gilpin Faust and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2009-01-06 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • An "extraordinary ... profoundly moving" history (The New York Times Book Review) of the American Civil War that reveals the ways that death on such a scale changed not only individual lives but the life of the nation. An estiated 750,000 soldiers lost their lives in the American Civil War. An equivalent proportion of today's population would be seven and a half million. In This Republic of Suffering, Drew Gilpin Faust describes how the survivors managed on a practical level and how a deeply religious culture struggled to reconcile the unprecedented carnage with its belief in a benevolent God. Throughout, the voices of soldiers and their families, of statesmen, generals, preachers, poets, surgeons, nurses, northerners and southerners come together to give us a vivid understanding of the Civil War's most fundamental and widely shared reality. With a new introduction by the author, and a new foreword by Mike Mullen, 17th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Author : Pedro Hoffmeister
Publisher : Crooked Lane Books
ISBN 13 : 1639101357
Total Pages : 238 pages
Book Rating : 4.51/5 ( download)

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Download or read book American Afterlife written by Pedro Hoffmeister and published by Crooked Lane Books. This book was released on 2022-12-06 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The earthquake was just the beginning. Now, the true horror arrives in this unflinching, near-future thriller about family and survival, for fans of Chuck Wendig. The Pacific Northwest lies in ruins in the aftermath of the 9.2 Cascadia earthquake. There is a tsunami at the coast, annihilated infrastructure in all the towns and cities, and failed dams in the Oregon river valley where 15-year-old Cielo lives with her mother, a fearful evangelical who’s become caught up in a fearsome cult called The Collection of Redeemed Souls. Cielo and her mother, Mexican citizens without U.S. papers, have always had their status teeter on the edge—and now it’s about to plunge into the abyss. When the earthquake hits, Cielo’s mother hasn’t been home in days, but Cielo suspects that she’s holed up with the cult and might even be dead. When the National Guard arrives to evacuate survivors, she stays behind in the flooded city to find her body. Members of The Collection of Redeemed Souls have also chosen to stay, and their disciples are capturing anyone still left behind and converting them to the cult by force. Entering a deadly game of cat-and-mouse, Cielo tries to evade the cult at every turn as she desperately searches for her mother’s remains. With gunfights and mass killings engulfing the city, Cielo is one step away from her own demise, but the bonds of blood drive her on toward a confrontation with pure evil—and a final chance for her mother’s redemption.

Author : Robert T. Conn
Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 3030262189
Total Pages : 527 pages
Book Rating : 4.81/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Bolívar’s Afterlife in the Americas written by Robert T. Conn and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-04-01 with total page 527 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Simón Bolívar is the preeminent symbol of Latin America and the subject of seemingly endless posthumous attention. Interpreted and reinterpreted in biographies, histories, political writings, speeches, and works of art and fiction, he has been a vehicle for public discourse for the past two centuries. Robert T. Conn follows the afterlives of Bolívar across the Americas, tracing his presence in a range of competing but interlocking national stories. How have historians, writers, statesmen, filmmakers, and institutions reworked his life and writings to make cultural and political claims? How has his legacy been interpreted in the countries whose territories he liberated, as well as in those where his importance is symbolic, such as the United States? In answering these questions, Conn illuminates the history of nation building and hemispheric globalism in the Americas.

Author : Mark Binelli
Publisher : Macmillan
ISBN 13 : 1250039231
Total Pages : 349 pages
Book Rating : 4.31/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Detroit City Is the Place to Be written by Mark Binelli and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2013-11-05 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Once America's capitalist dream town, Detroit is our country's greatest urban failure, having fallen the longest and the farthest. But the city's worst crisis yet (and that's saying something) has managed to do the unthinkable: turn the end of days into a laboratory for the future. Urban planners, land speculators, neo-pastoral agriculturalists, and utopian environmentalists--all have been drawn to Detroit's baroquely decaying, nothing-left-to-lose frontier. With an eye for both the darkly absurd and the radically new, Detroit-area native and Rolling Stone writer Mark Binelli has chronicled this convergence. Throughout the city's "museum of neglect"--its swaths of abandoned buildings, its miles of urban prairie--he tracks the signs of blight repurposed, from the school for pregnant teenagers to the killer ex-con turned street patroller, from the organic farming on empty lots to GM's wager on the Volt electric car and the mayor's realignment plan (the most ambitious on record) to move residents of half-empty neighborhoods into a viable, new urban center. Sharp and impassioned, Detroit City Is the Place to Be is alive with the sense of possibility that comes when a city hits rock bottom. Beyond the usual portrait of crime, poverty, and ruin, we glimpse a future Detroit that is smaller, less segregated, greener, economically diverse, and better functioning--what might just be the first post-industrial city of our new century"--

Author : Samuel Scheffler
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 019998252X
Total Pages : 221 pages
Book Rating : 4.23/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Death and the Afterlife written by Samuel Scheffler and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-09-09 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Suppose you knew that, though you yourself would live your life to its natural end, the earth and all its inhabitants would be destroyed thirty days after your death. To what extent would you remain committed to your current projects and plans? Would scientists still search for a cure for cancer? Would couples still want children? In Death and the Afterlife, philosopher Samuel Scheffler poses this thought experiment in order to show that the continued life of the human race after our deaths--the "afterlife" of the title--matters to us to an astonishing and previously neglected degree. Indeed, Scheffler shows that, in certain important respects, the future existence of people who are as yet unborn matters more to us than our own continued existence and the continued existence of those we love. Without the expectation that humanity has a future, many of the things that now matter to us would cease to do so. By contrast, the prospect of our own deaths does little to undermine our confidence in the value of our activities. Despite the terror we may feel when contemplating our deaths, the prospect of humanity's imminent extinction would pose a far greater threat to our ability to lead lives of wholehearted engagement. Scheffler further demonstrates that, although we are not unreasonable to fear death, personal immortality, like the imminent extinction of humanity, would also undermine our confidence in the values we hold dear. His arresting conclusion is that, in order for us to lead value-laden lives, what is necessary is that we ourselves should die and that others should live. Death and the Afterlife concludes with commentary by four distinguished philosophers--Harry Frankfurt, Niko Kolodny, Seana Shiffrin, and Susan Wolf--who discuss Scheffler's ideas with insight and imagination. Scheffler adds a final reply.

Author : Bernie Cook
Publisher : University of Texas Press
ISBN 13 : 0292782500
Total Pages : 241 pages
Book Rating : 4.01/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Thelma & Louise Live! written by Bernie Cook and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When they floored their Thunderbird off a cliff rather than surrender to the law, Thelma and Louise became icons of female rebellion, provoking strong reactions from viewers who felt either empowered or outraged by the duo's transgressions of women's traditional roles. The 1991 film quickly became—and continues to be—a potent cultural reference point, even inspiring a bumper sticker that declares, "Thelma & Louise Live!" In this insightful study of Thelma & Louise, six noted film scholars investigate the initial reception and ongoing impact of this landmark film. The writers consider Thelma & Louise from a variety of perspectives, turning attention to the film's promotion and audience response over time; to theories of comedy and the role of laughter in the film; to the film's soundtrack and score; to the performances of stars Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis; to the emergence of Brad Pitt as a star and male sex object; and to the film's place in the history of road and crime film genres. Complementing the scholarly analysis is an in-depth interview of screenwriter Callie Khouri by editor Bernie Cook, as well as reviews of Thelma & Louise that appeared in U.S. News & World Report and Time. Offering myriad new ways of understanding the complex interrelations of gender, identity, and violence, Thelma & Louise Live! attests to the ongoing life and still-evolving meanings of this now-classic film.

Author : Elisa Medhus
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1582704619
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.16/5 ( download)

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Download or read book My Son and the Afterlife written by Elisa Medhus and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-10 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After her son, Erik, committed suicide at age twenty, a physician, who had always placed her faith in science, finds her skepticism of life after death turning into belief when Erik begins communicating with her from the other side.