Volume 21, Number 17 · October 31, 1974
Surviving Death
By J.M. Cameron
Living and Dying
by Robert Jay Lifton, by Eric Olson
Praeger, 156 pp., $6.50
The Denial of Death
by Ernest Becker
The Free Press, 314 pp., $7.95
Ending
by Hilma Wolitzer
William Morrow, 223 pp., $6.95
Jewish Reflections on Death
edited by Rabbi Jack Riemer, with a foreword by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
Schocken Books, 224 pp., $7.95 (to be published in January, 1975)
For some years now people have been saying that death is to us what sex was to the Victorians, suppressed as a topic in ordinary society, repressed as a future certainty by most people most of the time, something children should be shielded from, for they are not to be admitted to the bedside of the dying or allowed to see dead human bodies and they are told stories about death analogous to the stories that used to be told, perhaps still are told in prim circles, about gestation and birth. Death is now prettified out of existence by the relentless and mendacious undertaking industry, with its euphemisms ('casket,' 'passed away,' 'loved one') and its painting and mummification of the corrupting body so that it may appear to be something else. After all, sexual repression hasn't been abolished by frankness in talk, and it may be that the repression of the thought of death is not altogether separable from sexual repression. The interest we have in necrophilia, and the repugnance we at the same time have for it, are both evident. Stories about the English necrophile Christie, who strangled women in order to copulate with them, are eagerly read. So far as I know such acts have not yet been performed on the screen or mimicked in the theater, but my information may well not be up-to-date.
Review, 4195 words
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