100 books like Western Attitudes toward Death

This book is a really fun investigation by a brilliant journalist who leads readers through a thorough yet skeptical look at the Silicon Valley-based movement known as “radical life extension” or “transhumanism.”

From hobbyists, to hackers, to scientists, to venture capitalists, a broad contingent of people in and around the “tech” space are convinced today that techno-scientific advancement will eventually allow humanity—or at least a certain small cadre of the wealthiest and savviest humans—to live forever.

There are heavy ideas here, and the book will give you a lot to think about, but it manages to be a breezy read despite the often troubling subject matter.  

This is the most moving “academic” book I’ve ever read, and really that’s because it blends academic subjects like cultural studies with more personal, memoir-type writing about being a Black woman in the 21st century.

In the Wake is concerned with more than just death, of course, but death looms large throughout the book, as it has in all of Black life throughout American history. Indeed, the first sentence is “I wasn’t there when my sister died,” and over the course of the book we bear witness to many other deaths that have affected the author as well.

Over time, readers come to understand the various meanings of “wake” operating as overlapping metaphors through which the author understands her own experience. There is “wake” as coming into consciousness/waking up to a world full of injustice, there is “the wake” like the path behind a ship, in this case a slave… show more.

I was blown away by this thought-provoking philosophical examination of the relationship between the living and the dead.

Burial, Hans Ruin points out, is the most ancient cultural-symbolic practice in all of human development. In burying the dead, and through the attendant rituals accompanying burial, we are caring for them and communicating about or with them. Ruin looks at a variety of ways that such care has been accomplished and debated over time, from prehistoric graves to ancient Egyptian pyramids to Sophoclean dramas from ancient Greece.

All of these examples are put to use as part of a larger meditation on what it means to live ethically; as he puts it “there is no social space entirely outside the shared space with the dead. To learn to live is to learn to inhabit this space in a responsible way. Life is a life after, as inheritance, ancestry, legacy and fate.”     

This book is not about death on its own but images of death, and the roles to which they are put by the press and politicians.

Focusing on iconic photographs of death from events such as the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, the Vietnam War, and the September 11th attacks, among many others, Zelizer charts a growing discomfort over time with images of death in the news. As technology improved, such photos became more graphic and intimate, and norms around the increasingly professionalized field of journalism came to render them mostly off limits.

Despite the general squeamishness of Western journalists and readers towards such images today, however, we do still see them during major world events and important breaking stories. It’s also true, Zelizer points out, that images of death in far away places are often shown in American newspapers with less concern.

There are important lessons here for all of… show more.

This book, in a fashion similar to Julian Jaynes’s theories about bicameral mentality and consciousness, challenges comfortable assumptions. It does this by demonstrating that though what we think (content) differs by place and period, mentalities (processes) themselves are neither invariant nor universal.

Specifically, it offers a detailed study of literature and shows how notions of causality and temporal thought processes that we take for granted were undeveloped in earlier centuries. 

This book is like a reminder of the wisdom that already lies latent within us (by “us” I’m identifying as a cis-gender woman, but that does not exclude anyone else, just helps to clarify). Rather than a gentle nudge, Dancing in the Flames’ approach to uncovering the buried dark goddess in modern culture is more of a slap in the face. A wake-up call that, I personally, have been intuiting for years. Woodman and Dickson weave together true historical accounts and cultural representations of why the dark goddess is essential for human and societal growth. Eerily similar to my highly sci-fi/fantastical book, I stumbled upon Dancing in the Flames while conducting research for my dark-fem-rising story. I hang on every word they write as it 100% rings true for me.

Kermode focuses on the dynamics of northern urban society in the three major towns along the corridor on the lowland plain by the River Ouse—York, Beverley, and Hull. Merchants from the three towns joined partnerships and intermarried, creating dynasties, the most prominent mingling with the gentry and royal households of the region, and served in parliament as MP’s. The merchants tend to be wealthier than their craftsmen neighbors.

Chapters cover politics, the nuts, and bolts of their trade, how they accrued wealth, and how they used that wealth. Appendix B, Some Merchant Biographies, reads like the society pages, offering tantalizing glimpses into family connections.

I am including Turkey as located in Asia Minor. As a frequent visitor to Istanbul in the past, I watched with fascination the whirling Dervishes. I know it is corrupted by tourism. The dance reflects the legacy of Rumi the 13 century Persian poet. The beauty of Rumi’s philosophy and the world of Sufism comes through as does the grace of the body.

Almost everything we know about the Vikings—their gods and heroes, their history and myths, their values and fears—comes from texts written down on parchment in medieval Iceland. Yet the Icelandic sagas and Eddas are biased. They explain very little about the Vikings in the east (and get wrong much of what they do describe). Their world is not the Viking World, which stretched from Constantinople to North America, but Viking Iceland.

Jesse Byock brings all this material together in Viking Age Iceland. First published in 2001, this immensely readable book is a classic that has not yet been bettered. It should be on every Viking enthusiast’s shelf.

When I arrived in Oxford in 1998 to begin my doctorate, I knew a bit about English medieval history, but almost nothing about the histories of Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. That deficiency was corrected by Prof Rees Davies, at whose feet I was lucky enough to sit. Earlier that same year Rees had delivered the prestigious Ford lectures in Oxford, and they were published two years later as The First English Empire. Deeply learned, but also beautifully written, they are a powerful meditation on centuries when English power expanded aggressively into the rest of the British Isles, and the effects this had on national identities, which continue to resonate to this day.