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Loading... The Mansion of Happiness: A History of Life and Death (2012)by Jill Lepore
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"A history of American ideas about life and death includes coverage of topics ranging from the 17th-century Englishman who investigated a belief about life starting with eggs and the heated debates over Darwin's evolutionary findings to the role of the Space Age in changing views on planetary life to the 1970s trends in cryogenics." --Publishers description
A history of American ideas about life and death from before the cradle to beyond the grave. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)973History and Geography North America United StatesLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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Reading this book got me thinking a lot about ideas and what we take for granted. It made me wonder what people 100 years in the future, or even 50 years in the future, will think about us—our political battles, our religious beliefs, how we raise families, how we approach life and death(which is the focus of this book, although I think it would be a better description to say it's about our approaches to the stages of life).
The introduction, a short history of board games—specifically about games that mimic life: the titular Mansion of Happiness, the Game of Life, and many others—sets up the structure for the book. The chapters are a progression of life's stages and moments in history that formed pervading ideas about these stages. The Children's Room, about the origin of children's libraries and more widespread attention being shown to children's literature, was the chapter I enjoyed the most.
This book is not really 320 pages long. It's 192 pages, and the rest of the pages are mostly endnotes. I’m glad she so thoroughly documented her sources, but I wish she had done footnotes rather than endnotes. I can't see a little number at the end of a sentence and ignore it, so I did a lot of flipping back and forth.
My rating is really closer to 3.5 stars, but the book did get my brain working, and it was definitely worth my time. ( )