Best of
Death

1990

The Wall


Eve Bunting - 1990
    A young boy and his father visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

To Dance with the White Dog


Terry Kay - 1990
    From author Terry Kay."A deftly shaped and vivid book...a tender and bracing tale of an octogenarian fighting to live a connected and purposeful life." ―The New York Times"A hauntingly beautiful story about love, family and relationships...I found it all such a moving experience, a lovely enduring tribute to love." ―The Most Reverend Desmond M. Tutu"Terry Kay is a perfect writer for those who love to read. His prose contains music and passion and fire. His work is tender and heartbreaking and memorable." ―Pat Conroy, New York Times best-selling authorThe elderly Sam Peek is still mourning the death of his beloved wife when a mysterious white dog appears. Seen only by Sam, White Dog becomes a part of Sam's grief. Though it's unclear if White Dog is real or phantom, the creature eases Sam's sorrow, brings him closer to his family, and helps him reconcile with his own mortality.Bestselling author Terry Kay brings Northeast Georgia to life through his elegant prose, and the thought-provoking themes of family, love, and loss will make readers come back to this touching story again and again.Also an Emmy Award-winning Hallmark Hall of Fame movie starring Hume Cronyn and Academy Award-winner Jessica Tandy.

Closer to the Light: Learning from the Near-Death Experiences of Children


Melvin Morse - 1990
    In hundreds of interviews with children who had once been declared clinically dead, Dr. Morse found that children too young to have absorbed our adult views and ideas of death, share first-hand accounts of out-of-body travel, telepathic communication and encounters with dead friends and relatives. Finally illuminating what it is like to die, here is proof that there is that elusive "something" that survives "bodily death."

Song of Songs


Beverley Hughesdon - 1990
    Perfect for readers of Kitty Neale or Margaret Dickinson Lady Helena Girvan was born into privilege, the daughter of a wealthy landowner, assured of a life of safety and comfort. Then war descends.Volunteering as an auxiliary nurse in London’s gritty East End, Helena quickly loses her naivety, and her illusions. But she has something even more terrifying in store – not only the bloody battlefields of France but deep fears about the safety of the men she loves: her friends, her brothers and her husband.Little does Helena know, however, the war will live on in the form of a man she slowly comes to love with an irresistible sensuality, despite their many differences.This epic and passionate story speaks for a whole generation and continues to speak vividly to us today. Available digitally for the first time, Song of Songs is a heartbreaking modern classic set in the time and milieu of Downton Abbey. Beloved by reading groups and book clubs, and sure to appeal to readers of Diney Costeloe and Gone With The Wind, it is the first of five extraordinary Beverley Hughesdon novels to be released as ebooks in 2016.‘Beautifully written, sensual and sad… Song of Songs moved me to tears’ Woman’s World‘One of my all time top 10. A sweeping saga that has the power to reduce a reader to tears.’ Claire, Goodreads‘I loved it. Every page of it. It transports me back in time, I laugh, I cry (lots) and I love the steamy bits. Best romance novel I have ever read.’ Janna, GoodreadsBeverley Hughesdon was a successful and acclaimed author of historical fiction, with novels including Roses Have Thorns, Silver Fountains and Mayfair Rebel. She lived in Lancashire.

Sleeping Beauty: Memorial Photography in America


Stanley B. Burns - 1990
    Includes a chronological essay on death in America, as well as a bibliography.Sleeping Beauty is coveted for having played a large role in the rediscovery of the normalcy of postmortem photography. In 1990, Dr. Stanley B. Burns' landmark publication Sleeping Beauty, Memorial in Photography in America, ushered in a new era of appreciation of the importance of these images. Since the publication of Sleeping Beauty, exhibitions based on the 3-book series of memorial images have been created regularly. Perhaps the most prestigious was Le Dernier Portrait at Paris' Musée d'Orsay in 2002. To accompany the exhibit, Sleeping Beauty II: Grief, Bereavement and the Family, American & European Traditions was produced. In 2011, Sleeping Beauty III: Memorial Photography, The Children was written. Numerous other documentarians and feature filmmakers have utilized these poignant photographs, most notably in The Others. The Burns Archive serves as the premier source of images related to death, mourning and medial practices. Postmortem photography is the taking of a photograph of a deceased loved one, and was a normal part of American and European culture in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It has nothing to do with images of violence, crime, or war. Death, and personally dealing with death, was prevalent throughout the entire world as epidemics would come quickly and kill quickly. Advances in medicine removed unexpected death from everyday life and professionals took over. Commissioned by grieving families, postmortem photographs not only helped in the grieving process, but often represented the only visual remembrance of the deceased and were among a family's most precious possessions. Mourning periods were based on family relationships and could last from months to years. Small photographs of the deceased were often carried in lockets or kept close to the body for greater intimacy. As many of the diseases that killed our ancestors were conquered and photography advanced during the century, society grew more and more distant from death, and practices, styles, and traditions of mourning and memorialization changed.The earliest postmortem photographs were often close-ups of the face or full body, at times depicted to appear lifelike or napping. Children were often positioned in a crib, posed with a favorite toy, or with a family member, most often the mother. Later photographs depict the subject in a coffin. Flowers, like forget-me-nots and calla lilies, were common in postmortem photography of all types. Later photographic memorials involve a shrine usually including a living portrait and flowers dedicated to the deceased.

Some Thing Black


Jacques Roubaud - 1990
    The grief-stricken author responded with one brief poem ("Nothing"), then fell silent for thirty months. In subsequent years, Roubaud--poet, novelist, mathematician--composed a series of prose poems, a collection that is a profound mediation on the experience of death, the devastation it brings to the lover who goes on living, and the love that remains. Despite the universality of this experience, no other writer has so devoted himself to exploring and recording the many-edged forms of grief, mourning, bewilderment, emptiness, and loneliness that attend death. No other writer has provided a kind of solace while facing with honesty and hardness the intricate ways in which the living are affected by such a loss. Some Thing Black is an ongoing monologue from Roubaud to his wife, as death assaults the mind's failure to comprehend absence. Roubaud both refuses to and cannot surrender his wife to the past ("I always wake up in your voice, your hand, your smell"). The death, having occurred in an instant of time, goes on in him ("But inside me your death proceeds slowly, incomprehensibly"). While acknowledging "death calls for a poetry of meditation," Roubaud is enraged at the limitations of language and words to affect the biological reality. Rather, all that language can do is clarify the exactness of his grief and to recall precisely the image of her life and death. But such recollection--the sight of her dead body, her photographs, her things, the rooms they lived in--becomes a "memory infinitely torturous." And his most anguished recollection is of their making love ("These memories are the darkest of all"), and a sense of guilt for somehow not having prevented her death ("I did not save you from that difficult night"). This is a brave and honest book that does not disguise that pain of loss. Its nobility, grace, and humanity rest in its refusal to falsify death's harsh presence ("This dirty rotten life to be mixed up with death") and in its acceptance of the mind's limitations ("I do not understand"). This moving, compassionate, uncompromising book is one of the most significant works of our time. Included in this edition is a portfolio of photographs made by Roubaud's wife in 1980 entitled "If Some Thing Black."

The Radiant Coat: Myths Stories about the Crossing Between Life and Death


Clarissa Pinkola Estés - 1990
    Clarissa Pinkola Estés has developed seminal methods to help ease the fear that can accompany the dying process. On The Radiant Coat, this bestselling author shares myths and stories first told at the bedsides of the dying to comfort them and their loved ones. For other cultures, Dr. Estés teaches, death holds no terror. It is in fact characterized as an ally, a wise and caring figure, leading departed souls through the starry night into the next day. This application of storytelling as a precious medicine for the terminally ill has attracted worldwide attention to the work of Dr. Estés. Fusing stories with useful psychological analysis, she removes the cloak of fear that surrounds the dying process. The Radiant Coat is a uniquely helpful collection of teaching stories, offered to help all listeners who seek to understand death—not as the end of life—but as another beginning.Additional contents: Death as a companion; consciously preparing for death; the four tasks in crossing between the worlds; dreams of the dying; medical intervention; the split archetype of the doctor as both life-bringer and escort through the doorway of death. Stories include: Godfather Death, The Water Glass, The Radiant Coat, and more.

The Siren Call of Hungry Ghosts: A Riveting Investigation Into Channeling and Spirit Guides


Joe Fisher - 1990
    Today, the practice of channeling spirit guides through hypnotized mediums is hotly debated. This strange phenomenon is either dismissed as a dubious parlor trick, or regarded as a form of communication between this world and the next. Many view "the guides" as a source of love and wisdom...but are they? For five years, Joe Fisher painstakingly investigated the claims of channelers and the mysterious voices that speak through them. The Siren Call of Hungry Ghosts is his gripping journey into a realm of darkness and deception.

Auschwitz: A History in Photographs


Teresa Świebocka - 1990
    Photographic survey of Auschwitz concentration camp chronicling its historical facts.

The Fireside Book Of Death


Robert Wilkins - 1990
    

The Keys of This Blood: Pope John Paul II Versus Russia and the West for Control of the New World Order


Malachi Martin - 1990
     * Will America lead the way to the new world order? * Is Pope John Paul II winning the battle for faith? * Is the breakup of the Soviet empire masking Gorbachev's worldwide agenda? The Keys of This Blood is a book of stunning geopolitical revelations. It presents a compelling array of daring blueprints for global power, and one of them is the portrait of the future.

Daniel's Dog


Jo Ellen Bogart - 1990
    Then his deceased grandfather sends Lucy, a ghost dog, to keep him company. Lucy always has time for Daniel and when Daniel's best friend feels lonely, Daniel creates another ghost dog to keep his friend Norman company. Full-color illustrations.

The Illusion of Immortality


Corliss Lamont - 1990
    Written with wisdom and eloquence, this book thoroughly but sensitively discusses biblical notions of death, the impact of science, the various attempts by immortalists to describe heaven, and the failure of spiritual "proofs." Corliss Lamont also argues for a new, ethical affirmation of life based upon an appreciation of our common mortality.

Naked by the Window: The Fatal Marriage of Carl Andre and Ana Mendieta


Robert Katz - 1990
    The mystery of Ana's death and its cicumstances has never been resolved -- until now. Illustrated.