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 forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.
Known for her often contentious perspectives, New York Times opinion writer Weiss battles societal Jewish intolerance through lucid prose and a linear playbook of remedies.
While she was vividly aware of anti-Semitism throughout her life, the reality of the problem hit home when an active shooter stormed a Pittsburgh synagogue where her family regularly met for morning services and where she became a bat mitzvah years earlier. The massacre that ensued there further spurred her outrage and passionate activism. She writes that European Jews face a three-pronged threat in contemporary society, where physical, moral, and political fears of mounting violence are putting their general safety in jeopardy. She believes that Americans live in an era when “the lunatic fringe has gone mainstream” and Jews have been forced to become “a people apart.” With palpable frustration, she adroitly assesses the origins of anti-Semitism and how its prevalence is increasing through more discreet portals such as internet self-radicalization. Furthermore, the erosion of civility and tolerance and the demonization of minorities continue via the “casual racism” of political figures like Donald Trump. Following densely political discourses on Zionism and radical Islam, the author offers a list of bullet-point solutions focused on using behavioral and personal action items—individual accountability, active involvement, building community, loving neighbors, etc.—to help stem the tide of anti-Semitism. Weiss sounds a clarion call to Jewish readers who share her growing angst as well as non-Jewish Americans who wish to arm themselves with the knowledge and intellectual tools to combat marginalization and defuse and disavow trends of dehumanizing behavior. “Call it out,” she writes. “Especially when it’s hard.” At the core of the text is the author’s concern for the health and safety of American citizens, and she encourages anyone “who loves freedom and seeks to protect it” to join with her in vigorous activism.
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-593-13605-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2019
Bernstein and Woodward, the two Washington Post journalists who broke the Big Story, tell how they did it by old fashioned seat-of-the-pants reporting — in other words, lots of intuition and a thick stack of phone numbers. They've saved a few scoops for the occasion, the biggest being the name of their early inside source, the "sacrificial lamb" H**h Sl**n. But Washingtonians who talked will be most surprised by the admission that their rumored contacts in the FBI and elsewhere never existed; many who were telephoned for "confirmation" were revealing more than they realized. The real drama, and there's plenty of it, lies in the private-eye tactics employed by Bernstein and Woodward (they refer to themselves in the third person, strictly on a last name basis). The centerpiece of their own covert operation was an unnamed high government source they call Deep Throat, with whom Woodward arranged secret meetings by positioning the potted palm on his balcony and through codes scribbled in his morning newspaper. Woodward's wee hours meetings with Deep Throat in an underground parking garage are sheer cinema: we can just see Robert Redford (it has to be Robert Redford) watching warily for muggers and stubbing out endless cigarettes while Deep Throat spills the inside dope about the plumbers. Then too, they amass enough seamy detail to fascinate even the most avid Watergate wallower — what a drunken and abusive Mitchell threatened to do to Post publisher Katherine Graham's tit, and more on the Segretti connection — including the activities of a USC campus political group known as the Ratfuckers whose former members served as a recruiting pool for the Nixon White House. As the scandal goes public and out of their hands Bernstein and Woodward seem as stunned as the rest of us at where their search for the "head ratfucker" has led. You have to agree with what their City Editor Barry Sussman realized way back in the beginning — "We've never had a story like this. Just never."
Pub Date: June 18, 1974
ISBN: 0671894412
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1974
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