Best of
Death

1976

The Distant Summer


Sarah Patterson - 1976
    Poignant story of a girl who loves two WWII flyers, written by the daughter of suspense writer Jack Higgins when she was just 17.

Symbolic Exchange and Death


Jean Baudrillard - 1976
    This major work, appearing in English for the first time, occupies a central place in the rethinking of the humanities and social sciences around the idea of postmodernism.It leads the reader on an exhilarating tour encompassing the end of Marxism, the enchantment of fashion, symbolism about sex and the body, and the relations between economic exchange and death. Most significantly, the book represents Baudrillard's fullest elaboration of the concept of the three orders of the simulacra, defining the historical passage from production to reproduction to simulation.A classic in its field, Symbolic Exc

The Human Encounter With Death


Stanislav Grof - 1976
    Theirs is an extraordinary range of experience, in clinical research with psychedelic substances, in cross-cultural and medical anthropology, and in the analysis of Oriental and archaic literatures. Their pioneering work with psychedelics administered to individuals dying of cancer opened domains of experience that proved to be nearly identical to those already mapped in the "Books of the Dead", those mystical visionary accounts of the posthumous journeys of the soul. The Grof/Halifax book and these ancient resources both show the imminent experience of death as a continuation of what had been the hidden aspect of the experience of life.—Joseph CampbellThe authors have assisted persons dying of cancer in transcending the anxiety and anger around their personal fate. Using psychedelics, they have guided the patients to death-rebirth experiences that resemble transformation rites practiced in a variety of cultures. Physician and medical anthropologist join here in recreating an old art—the art of dying. —June SingerThe Human Encounter With Death is the latest of many recent publications in the newly evolving field of thanatology. It is, however, a quite different kind of book—one that be- longs in every library of anyone who seriously tries to understand the phenomenon we call death.—from the Foreword by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

On Suicide: A Discourse on Voluntary Death


Jean Améry - 1976
    a moving, deep series of insights into the suicide's world... " --Kirkus ReviewsJean Amery (Auschwitz survivor and author of At the Mind's Limits) thought of On Suicide as a continuation of the kind of reflections on mortality he had laid down in On Aging. But here he probes further and more deeply into the meaning of death and into the human capacity for suicide or voluntary death.

The Birth We Call Death


Paul H. Dunn - 1976
    Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, c1976.