Customer Reviews

Western Attitudes toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present (The Johns Hopkins Symposia in Comparative History)

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I initially started reading this for a "Sex and Death" class I took at school. Amazingly, "Western Attitudes Towards Death" has been one of the most inciteful books I've ever read. Aries makes it interesting to look at death in a historical aspect. For me, it was most interesting in the fact that you can see how people lived during a specific time period by studying how they viewed death. The parallels between life and death in EVERY society has become astonishingly clear to me. It's short reading...definately in a day...and well worth the time.

i had a certain agenda in reading this book . . . there is a conspiracy of silence regarding death in america/europe.
aries takes the reader on a morbid but a fascinating journey through western history of death. the conclusion is that death has become the "new pornography" (quoting gorer) in a modern/enlightenment based societies. death is the great scandal in the western culture where everything is, or at least hoped to be in the future, controlled by the development of science. but death lies beyond that hope. at least that's my take on it.

A fantastic read - both brief and accessible as well as informative and challenging. Phillipe Aries' seminal study of how the treatment of death and dying has changed dramatically in Western Civilization should provoke the reader to think about death as more than something to be avoided, but something to be anticipated.

In American culture obsessed with youth, death has been shoved into the closet to be peeked at only when absolutely necessary. We deny our own mortality, hiding our advancing years with surgeries and fad diets and fashion and promiscuity. Effectively, we are completely un-equipped to handle death, whether someone else's or our own. We not only don't wish to think about it, we can't. It's hidden, and we are supposed to deny ourselves even the visible grief which a true loss of any kind merits. We are often expected to be more emotional about a damaged vehicle or a bad meal or a rude person in traffic than we are when dealing with the death of a loved one.

Read and learn. Read and re-evaluate the wisdom of such intentional ignorance, and what you might wish to do differently for yourself and for those around you whenever the time comes to shuffle off this mortal coil.