Renowned Harvard scholar and "New Yorker" staff writer Jill
Lepore has written a strikingly original, ingeniously conceived,
and beautifully crafted history of American ideas about life and
death from before the cradle to beyond the grave.
How does life begin? What does it mean? What happens when we die?
"All anyone can do is ask," Lepore writes. "That's why any history
of ideas about life and death has to be, like this book, a history
of curiosity." Lepore starts that history with the story of a
seventeenth-century Englishman who had the idea that all life
begins with an egg, and ends it with an American who, in the 1970s,
began freezing the dead. In between, life got longer, the stages of
life multiplied, and matters of life and death moved from the
library to the laboratory, from the humanities to the sciences.
Lately, debates about life and death have determined the course of
American politics. Each of these debates has a history.
Investigating the surprising origins of the stuff of everyday
life--from board games to breast pumps--Lepore argues that the age
of discovery, Darwin, and the Space Age turned ideas about life on
earth topsy-turvy. "New worlds were found," she writes, and "old
paradises were lost." As much a meditation on the present as an
excavation of the past, "The Mansion of Happiness" is delightful,
learned, and altogether beguiling.
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