Western Attitudes toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present (The Johns Hopkins Symposia in Comparative History)
By:
Philippe Ariès
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Average Customer Rating: 4.5 out of 5
Description:
"AriA]s traces Western man's attitudes toward mortality from the early medieval conception of death as the familiar collective destiny of the human race to the modern tendency, so pronounced in industrial societies, to hide death as if it were an embarrassing family secret." -- Newsweek
Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Customer Review: 4 out of 5
a conspiracy of silence - i had a certain agenda in reading this book . . . there is a conspiracy of silence regarding death in america/europe.
aries takes the reader on a morbid but a fascinating journey through western history of death. the conclusion is that death has become the "new pornography" (quoting gorer) in a modern/enlightenment based societies. death is the great scandal in the western culture where everything is, or at least hoped to be in the future, controlled by the development of science. but death lies beyond that hope. at least that's my take on it.
Customer Review: 5 out of 5
Different Perspective of History - I initially started reading this for a "Sex and Death" class I took at school. Amazingly, "Western Attitudes Towards Death" has been one of the most inciteful books I've ever read. Aries makes it interesting to look at death in a historical aspect. For me, it was most interesting in the fact that you can see how people lived during a specific time period by studying how they viewed death. The parallels between life and death in EVERY society has become astonishingly clear to me. It's short reading...definately in a day...and well worth the time.
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