Customer Reviews

Death in Black and White: Death, Ritual and Family Ecology (Hampton Press Communication Series. Critical Bodies)

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This is a humane, engaging, and innovative text, written by an author who himself exemplifies integrative, postmodern scholarship. I find that the range of effects and affects in these pages surpasses even what the title suggests. Some readers might find it useful to begin with the final two or three chapters for current, global perceptions, and then return to preceding chapters for historical and more particular approaches. The case studies alone are worth reading the book. Above all, I hear a genuinely consoling voice-one that also offers some of the very best available cultural theory as well as a general theory of consciousness.

McIlwain accomplishes this, first off, with an abiding good will toward the common reader. Secondly, his comfort with first-person narratives offers access to his feelings, as well as to his thinking and scholarship. This affords a wide engagement with the perennial qualities of 'differences' with which we all not only live but also, inevitably, approach the deaths of others (and ourselves). Thirdly, McIlwain has an uncanny manner that, combined with intellectual acumen, makes his point not only comprehensible but also somehow `acceptable'-that we ARE all in this together, from the beginning to the very end.