A largely favorable portrait of a much-maligned industry sure to please most funeral directors, especially those running...
Laderman continues where he left off in The Sacred Remains (not reviewed), extending that study of “American attitudes toward death” into the 20th century.
The author immediately challenges Jessica Mitford’s 1963 indictment of the funeral industry, The American Way of Death, claiming that it overlooks cultural, religious, emotional, and psychological dimensions of disposal of the dead. Funeral directors are well-respected, Laderman (American Religious History and Culture/Emory Univ.) asserts, and their services are highly valued. He selects three cultural phenomena from the first half of the century—Rudolph Valentino’s funeral, Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town, and Walt Disney’s early animated films—to demonstrate what he terms an American fascination with death. (For those fascinated by celebrity funerals or curious about the respective merits of open and closed caskets, he also provides information about the preparation of President Kennedy’s corpse.) By embalming, dressing, and presenting a corpse in a setting away from home, he argues, funeral directors have enabled their clientele to say goodbye to the dead in a sanitary and religiously sanctified way. Quoting liberally from the trade literature of the funeral industry, Laderman chronicles its reaction to Mitford’s book in the 1960s and ’70s, to the FTC’s consumer protection measures of the ’80s, and to the emergence of huge death-care conglomerates in the ’80s and ’90s. He reveals how the AIDS epidemic affected funeral-home procedures and how the industry has responded to the growing death-awareness movement and increased demand for cremation in the US. What hasn’t changed, according to Laderman, is funeral directors’ desire to maintain control of the dead from last breath to final disposition, however that may be carried out.
A largely favorable portrait of a much-maligned industry sure to please most funeral directors, especially those running small-town, family-owned businesses.Pub Date: March 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-19-513608-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2003
Tisdale (Stepping Westward, 1991, etc.) leads an enthusiastic amateur's tour through sex in America (with a few brief forays abroad). In an inviting expansion of her controversial 1992 Harper's magazine essay of the same title, Tisdale offers a trek through sexual inhibitions, expressions, assumptions, and questions (for instance, if everyone thinks about sex so much, why do so few feel comfortable discussing it?), arriving at an increasingly fashionable pro-sex feminism. Americans are so conflicted about sex, she says, because they're caught endlessly between obsession and avoidance. Tisdale, fighting avoidance, confronts the subject head on. She checks out sex clubs, sex toy stores, pornography shops, and erotic novels, citing everyone from Roland Barthes to Susie Bright. Ancient Greece, the story of Adam and Eve, Freud, Jesse Helms, and Basic Instinct convince her that we're a nation of guilty prudes, arrested adolescents who can't sate our lust for adult material. We're ``sex drenched and sex phobic.'' Tisdale indicates that the fear starts with men, but that women can help fix it. ``Women guiding the sexual drive of men changes them, gentles the institutions men have made to cope with their feelings toward women.'' One area she sees women reinventing is pornography. The chapter on this subject is by far the most controversial and at times tedious. Coming down hard on anti-porn feminists like Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin (even more than on the Religious Right), she argues for tolerance and maintains that the heterosexual nuclear family, reproductive legislation, and patriarchal society in general are likely to do more damage to women than any X-rated films. Finally, she reaches the unoriginal but hopeful point that sexual freedom contains the seeds of significant social change. ``The center will not hold...if radical sexuality works.'' Just about everything you always wanted to know about sex but were afraid to ask. Fluidly written, sexy, probing, personally revealing, and wise.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-385-46854-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
From New York Times reporter Bernstein (Fragile Glory, 1990), a stinging attack on multiculturalism, a ``messianic political program...[that] does not take kindly to true difference.'' Just as the egalitarian ideals of the French Revolution fell into a dÇrapage (slide) that led to the Reign of Terror, Bernstein avers, so the civil-rights revolution has lurched into a leftist intolerance that is contradictory to its professed pluralistic ideals. Broader-ranging than Dinesh D'Souza's Illiberal Education (1990), this analysis covers not only higher education, but also elementary and secondary school systems, state legislatures, corporations, newsrooms, even the National Council of Churches. All of these institutions, it is alleged, are increasingly being assaulted by pious, often well-meaning ``diversity experts'' who peddle fraudulent visions of an oppressive American and Western tradition. Bernstein sensibly contends that racism, sexism, and homophobia are receding to the margins of American life, not growing, as is often claimed. He neatly disposes of claims that today's ethnic and racial groups represent an exotic new force in American life by noting that immigration was proportionately higher in earlier eras, and that today's immigrants, unlike their predecessors, were constantly exposed to American culture before coming here. Bernstein offers chilling examples of how ``diversity'' has been used as a bludgeon by leftists in battle over high school curricula, sexual harassment hearings that deny due process, the commemoration of the 500th anniversary of Columbus's initial voyage to the New World, and school courses that stigmatize ``dead white European males.'' Worst of all, Bernstein charges, diversity advocates, now comfortably lodged in the intelligentsia, question cultural norms that have historically enhanced upward mobility in the US, thereby damaging the disadvantaged whose interest they claim to serve. A sophisticated, tough-minded examination of the newest fault line in late 20th century American culture. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 7, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-41156-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
