While occasionally flippant and straining to be clever, Cullen is mostly an amiable guide, and her tour is enjoyable and...
A fresh and funny look at what’s new in funerals.
Time magazine staff writer Cullen conducted her personal, on-site survey of funeral rites and after-death practices while pushing her infant daughter along in a stroller or toting her around in a backpack. Here she uses the present and past tense to distinguish between what she observed firsthand and what was described to her by event organizers or by friends or relatives of the deceased. A stroll through a funeral directors’ convention introduces the merchandising of death and personalized services. The roles of funeral directors and party planners have merged into a new profession, Cullen reports: that of funeral planners, who arrange celebrations that bring people together to honor and memorialize the deceased. With cremation gaining popularity, some businesses, such as flower shops and casket-makers, are declining or under threat, and whole new industries are popping up. Cullen visits a woman who has chosen to have her husband’s ashes made into a diamond she can wear; helps a pilot scatter ashes from his plane; and attends a burial at sea for which ashes have been mixed into concrete to form artificial reefs. Other options are freezing and mummification, a process she doesn’t witness but describes graphically. She also observes classes at a New York mortuary school, where she finds that education is not keeping pace with the changes that are sweeping the business. The traditional rituals of a lavish Hmong funeral she attends in Minneapolis are fascinating, yet they are outmatched by her moving account of her Buddhist grandfather’s funeral in Japan. In one unforgettable scene in this often lighthearted book, the author and her family use chopsticks to pick up the recognizable remains of the cremated body, starting with the feet and working upward, and place them in an urn.
While occasionally flippant and straining to be clever, Cullen is mostly an amiable guide, and her tour is enjoyable and enlightening.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-076683-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Collins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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