Fans pick 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. 

I first read this book not long after my mother passed away, and its argument against the over-medicalization of death and dying resonated powerfully with me since she died after spending her last weeks in a hospital. It revisits Ernest Becker's insight in a different way, that rather than treating death and dying as something that can be “fixed,” we need to acknowledge and embrace the end to give greater meaning to what leads up to it.

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.

Today surviving medieval church wall paintings are a bit of a rarity in England, but during the Middle Ages every church, almost without exception, would have been an absolute riot of colour, with saints, angels, and demons battling their way across the walls. What Rosewell's book does is allow you to understand not just what you are seeing, but how and why they were made in the first place. It explains the way in which the pigments were made, who painted them, and even who paid for them. It also contains an absolutely fantastic selection of images, that bring to life just how vibrant the walls of our churches once were. A gem.

Another companion on my journey to becoming a medievalist, The Oldest Vocation is one of the earliest works of medieval scholarship to take the history of motherhood seriously. Atkinson showed us how mothering was a calling in the medieval world, whether it was a physical experience or a spiritual one. I think this was the first book I ever bought the moment it was available!

Definitely not as grim as the title might suggest. All churches are crammed full of memorials to the dead, and many dozens of books have been written that focus upon the people who lie in these tombs, or beneath the elegant grave slabs. However, sometimes little attention has been given to these memorials themselves, and the craftspeople who made them. This book is the culmination of a lifetime's research and will fascinate anyone who has an interest in church decoration - or dead people.