Review by Choice Review
Schillace (Case Western Reserve Univ.) offers a sociopolitical exploration on how society has viewed the phenomenon of death and mourning across the ages, with a special emphasis on medicine and how "in the past 150 years, our approach to death in the West has changed markedly." Present civilization has sanitized the notion of death, and thereby become more removed from death and the natural process of dying than in the past. This book joins an emerging trend of works providing scholarly commentaries regarding current cultural perceptions of death. These include James Green's Beyond the Good Death: The Anthropology of Modern Dying (CH, Sep'08, 46-0381), Ann Neuman's The Good Death: An Exploration of Dying in America (CH, Aug'16, 53-5206), and Eve Joseph's In the Slender Margin: The Intimate Strangeness of Death and Dying (2016). Schillace engages readers by illustrating her points with interesting black-and-white images, snatches of poetry, and pertinent quotations peppered throughout. This interesting text is a worthy addition to academic libraries serving programs in history, funerary services, or health programs with a specialty in palliative care. However, libraries with similar works may opt to forgo this edition. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower- and upper-division undergraduates and general readers. --Jenna Michiko Enomoto, VA Roseburg Medical Center
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
THE KING AND QUEEN OF MALIBU: The True Story of the Battle Tor Paradise, by David K. Randall. (Norton, $15.95.) In the late 19 th century, Frederick Rindge headed West with his wife, May, and bought an enormous secluded ranch, which they thought would guarantee them eternal privacy. When nearby homesteaders began clamoring for rights along their private beach, the conflict devolved into an acrimonious battle whose legacy is still felt. THE NORTH WATER, by Ian McGuire. (Picador, $16.) An opium-addicted Irish surgeon, his reputation ruined during the siege of Delhi in 1857, joins the crew of a whaling ship, where he encounters a psychopathic harpooner motivated by violence. McGuire's novel, one of the Book Review's 10 Best Books of 2016, is "propelled by a vision that is savage, brutal and relentless," our reviewer, Colm Toibin, said. WE WERE FEMINISTS ONCE: From Riot Grrrl to CoverGirl®, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement, by Andi Zeisler. (PublicAffairs, $16.99.) Zeisler, a founding editor of Bitch magazine, chronicles the movement's relation to mainstream culture, from when the "f-word" was largely taboo to now, when brands co-opt the term. Today's "glossy, feel-good feminism," she says, threatens to divert attention from the real issue: systemic inequality. TRAVELERS REST, by Keith Lee Morris. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $15.99.) When a snowstorm derails their travel plans, to bring home an uncle from rehab, the Addisons seek refuge at a hotel in Good Night, Idaho, an eerie town where little is as it appears to be. The family are soon separated in the town and must try to find their way back to each other. Morris "has an adroit hand for characterization and atmosphere; the people feel real even when they actually are stand-ins for the uncanny," our reviewer, N. K. Jemisin, said. DEATH'S SUMMER COAT: What the History of Death and Dying Can Tell Us About Life and Living, by Brandy Schillace. (Pegasus, $16.95.) The reluctance to discuss death in modern Western societies is a relatively new development, Schillace notes. She investigates other cultures' mortality rituals, from "death cafes" to mourning practices in Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge's mass killings, as a way to lend new perspectives about grief. VINEGAR GIRL: William Shakespeare's "The Taming of the Shrew" Retold, by Anne Tyler. (Hogarth Shakespeare, $15.) In Tyler's reimagining, Kate - a preschool teacher loved by her students but unpopular with their parents - is roped into a green card marriage plot: Her father, a biologist working on a project his colleagues have all but dismissed, is desperate to keep his research assistant in the country.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [April 9, 2017]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Schillace, managing editor of the journal Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, goes beyond the typical treatise on mortality with this wide-ranging and captivating history of what it means to be alive. Beginning as early as her research permits (around 1800 B.C.E., with the first known medical text on pregnancy), she goes up to the present, showing how the rituals and procedures surrounding death derive from the theories humans use to come to terms with it. As Schillace herself notes, the book favors Western sources, with occasional dips into other cultures. Nonetheless, her explorations are extensive and interdisciplinary, drawing on research in the sciences but also valuing the many expressions of death in the arts. Accordingly, each chapter is illustrated with images, such as religious artwork and-most hauntingly-Victorian-era memento mori photography. Schillace, simply through her personable voice and personal stories, is able to breathe compassion into what might otherwise be a depressing topic. Though the main theme of grief and loss in death is familiar, readers will come away with ample new-and endlessly fascinating-information. This vibrant window to other lives also creates a deeper understanding of one's own. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Schillace (managing editor of Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry) raises the issue of the avoidance of mortality in Western culture. Through a historical-anthropological framework, she considers grief rituals in non-Western cultures and presents a selective history of Western approaches to death. Throughout this work, the focus is on death as event and process and on the act of grieving as a rite of passage. Moreover, the author's approach to Western history is haphazard, jumping from the Black Death to the Protestant Reformation to the Victorians. After the 19th century, religious rituals for death and dying are hardly mentioned. Instead, the book's concentration shifts to the role of doctors as priests in the "sanitized" dying process of today. Schillace concludes by exploring options for "rehumanizing" death through the creation of new customs. She considers briefly the emerging role of hospices and natural funerary practices; however, this section is sparse, with few suggestions. VERDICT Schillace raises a lot of questions surrounding the issue of mortality, leaving readers to form their own answers. Those interested in the topic should consider other works, such as Ann Neumann's The Good Death, for more representations on related Western perspectives.-Daniel Wigner, South Plains Coll., Lubbock, TX © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A wide-ranging, user-friendly attempt to make death an acceptable, even comfortable, topic of ordinary conversation. Cultural historian Schillace (Medical History/Case Western Reserve Univ.), managing editor of the health journal Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, believes that by learning about the practices associated with death and dying in other cultures and in earlier times, we can approach our mortality with less fear. In contrast to the medicalization of death in today's Western world, the author presents various rituals and cultural customs, including Tibetan Buddhist sky burials and Victorian memento mori photography, as ways of keeping the bereaved connected to the deceased. She skims lightly through centuries of history, touching on the replacement of priests by physicians at the deathbed, the impact of medieval plagues, and the role of body snatchers in medical education. Schillace partly compensates for the shallowness of the history with numerous unusual and fascinating black-and-white illustrations that feature corpses, skeletons, medical students, gravestones, and grieving mothers. Later in the narrative, the author turns to how death is managed in the contemporary West, how rituals have been devalued, how the dying have been hidden away from sight in hospitals, and how the disposal of the dead is managed by funeral directors. "Perhaps compassion works best in collaboration.Death need not be a solo affair," writes the author. "It can be communal, and is perhaps best approached in just that way." She writes glowingly of a growing movement to counter the death-denying attitude of Western society: the emergence of Death Salons and Death Cafes, in which ordinary people, not necessarily the bereaved, come together to talk openly and freely about death, to ask questions, and to share ideasto have a conversation about death. Surprisingly easy reading on a usually dark topic and fine preparation for anyone preparing to launch or simply attend a Death Salon or Cafe. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
