Volume 51, Number 6 · April 8, 2004
You Can Take It With You
By W.S. Merwin
The Dominion of the Dead
by Robert Pogue Harrison
University of Chicago Press,208 pp., $22.50
Mr. Harrison's subject in The Dominion of the Dead is suggested by questions posed on his book's jacket: 'How do the living maintain relations to the dead? Why do we bury people when they die? And what is at stake when we do?' We might think at first that these themes have seldom been directly addressed. Then of course we begin to remember, and Mr. Harrison artfully reminds us, that they have indeed been the subject of virtually constant and occasionally desperate consideration throughout the history, known and postulated, of our species, and in fact they comprise a subject underlying all the others.
Review, 5071 words
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