The Matter of Death

The Matter of Death
Author: J. Hockey
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2010-07-16
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0230283063

This collection opens up spaces where lives end, bodies are disposed of and memories generated: hospitals, hospices, care homes, coroners' courts, funeral premises, cemeteries, roadsides, the spirit world. Using material culture studies it illuminates the ways human beings make meaningful the challenges of death, dying and bereavement.

The Death and Life of Main Street

The Death and Life of Main Street
Author: Miles Orvell
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 315
Release: 2012-10-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0807837563

For more than a century, the term "Main Street" has conjured up nostalgic images of American small-town life. Representations exist all around us, from fiction and film to the architecture of shopping malls and Disneyland. All the while, the nation has become increasingly diverse, exposing tensions within this ideal. In The Death and Life of Main Street, Miles Orvell wrestles with the mythic allure of the small town in all its forms, illustrating how Americans continue to reinscribe these images on real places in order to forge consensus about inclusion and civic identity, especially in times of crisis. Orvell underscores the fact that Main Street was never what it seemed; it has always been much more complex than it appears, as he shows in his discussions of figures like Sinclair Lewis, Willa Cather, Frank Capra, Thornton Wilder, Margaret Bourke-White, and Walker Evans. He argues that translating the overly tidy cultural metaphor into real spaces--as has been done in recent decades, especially in the new urbanist planned communities of Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Andres Duany--actually diminishes the communitarian ideals at the center of this nostalgic construct. Orvell investigates the way these tensions play out in a variety of cultural realms and explores the rise of literary and artistic traditions that deliberately challenge the tropes and assumptions of small-town ideology and life.

When Death Enters the Therapeutic Space

When Death Enters the Therapeutic Space
Author: Laura Barnett
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2008-10-27
Genre: Family & Relationships
ISBN: 1134117019

Although it is a natural part of life, death is a subject that is often neglected in psychotherapeutic literature and training. In this book Laura Barnett and her contributors offer us insights into working with mortality in the therapeutic setting.

Death from the Skies!

Death from the Skies!
Author: Philip C. Plait
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2008
Genre: Science
ISBN: 9780670019977

It's only a matter of time before a cosmic disaster spells the end of the Earth. But how concerned should we about about any of these catastrophic scenarios? And if they do post a danger, can anything be done to stop them?

Architects of the Culture of Death

Architects of the Culture of Death
Author: Benjamin Wiker
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Total Pages: 412
Release: 2009-09-03
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1681490439

The phrase, ""the Culture of Death"", is bandied about as a catch-all term that covers abortion, euthanasia and other attacks on the sanctity of life. In Architects of the Culture of Death, authors Donald DeMarco and Benjamin Wiker expose the Culture of Death as an intentional and malevolent ideology promoted by influential thinkers who specifically attack Christian morality's core belief in the sanctity of human life and the existence of man's immortal soul. In scholarly, yet reader-friendly prose, DeMarco and Wiker examine the roots of the Culture of Death by introducing 23 of its architects, including Ayn Rand, Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Jean-Paul Sartre, Alfred Kinsey, Margaret Sanger, Jack Kevorkian, and Peter Singer. Still, this is not a book without hope. If the Culture of Death rests on a fragmented view of the person and an eclipse of God, the future of the Culture of Life relies on an understanding and restoration of the human being as a person, and the rediscovery of a benevolent God. The personalism of John Paul II is an illuminating thread that runs through Architects, serving as a hopeful antidote.

Deathscapes

Deathscapes
Author: Dr Avril Maddrell
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2012-11-28
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1409488837

Death is at once a universal and everyday, but also an extraordinary experience in the lives of those affected. Death and bereavement are thereby intensified at (and frequently contained within) certain sites and regulated spaces, such as the hospital, the cemetery and the mortuary. However, death also affects and unfolds in many other spaces: the home, public spaces and places of worship, sites of accident, tragedy and violence. Such spaces, or Deathscapes, are intensely private and personal places, while often simultaneously being shared, collective, sites of experience and remembrance; each place mediated through the intersections of emotion, body, belief, culture, society and the state. Bringing together geographers, sociologists, anthropologists, cultural studies academics and historians among others, this book focuses on the relationships between space/place and death/ bereavement in 'western' societies. Addressing three broad themes: the place of death; the place of final disposition; and spaces of remembrance and representation, the chapters reflect a variety of scales ranging from the mapping of bereavement on the individual or in private domestic space, through to sites of accident, battle, burial, cremation and remembrance in public space. The book also examines social and cultural changes in death and bereavement practices, including personalisation and secularisation. Other social trends are addressed by chapters on green and garden burial, negotiating emotion in public/ private space, remembrance of violence and disaster, and virtual space. A meshing of material and 'more-than-representational' approaches consider the nature, culture, economy and politics of Deathscapes - what are in effect some of the most significant places in human society.

Greta Zargo and the Death Robots from Outer Space

Greta Zargo and the Death Robots from Outer Space
Author: A.F. Harrold
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 261
Release: 2017-09-07
Genre: Young Adult Fiction
ISBN: 1408869489

Nobody knew it at that moment, but only three things stood in the way of the complete destruction of the Earth: one elderly parrot; one eight-year-old spelling mistake; and an intrepid young schoolgirl-turned-reporter in search of a story ... Greta Zargo needs a big scoop if she's going to win the Prilchard-Spritzer Medal, the quite famous award for great reporting. But big scoops are in short supply in the quiet little town of Upper Lowerbridge, and all Greta's got to investigate is a couple of missing cakes. But then, with a whoosh of unknown energy, a mysterious silver robot descends from the sky ... A laugh-out-loud funny new series from the author of the critically acclaimed The Imaginary, perfect for fans of Mr Gum, Chris Riddell, and Philip Reeve and Sarah McIntyre's Oliver and the Seawigs

After Death

After Death
Author: Francois J. Bonnet
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 72
Release: 2020-08-11
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1913029700

A disturbing portrait of a society deliriously dreaming itself as eternal, instantaneous, and infinite. At least for the time being, we humans are still finite and mortal—but death isn't what it used to be. As the body is technologically extended in space and time, we are split between our finitude and our doubled presence in a limitless web of signs, an “immortal” world of information. After Death offers a penetrating philosophical diagnosis of our contemporary condition, describing not only an anesthesia, but an amnesia in which the compulsions of a hyper-present colonize both past and future, prevailing over any sense of duration, becoming, or appreciation of the “thickness of the real.” Are we living in a kind of counterfeit eternity in which we are effectively already dead? Against the anxiety of the constant present, how can we hope to return to the experience of being in time and facing death? After Death is a disturbing portrait of a society deliriously dreaming itself as eternal, instantaneous, and infinite.