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Beschreibung

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.

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.

Über den Autor
Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her books include The Story of America; The Whites of Their Eyes; New York Burning, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and The Name of War, winner of the Bancroft Prize. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Details
Erscheinungsjahr: 2013
Fachbereich: Regionalgeschichte
Genre: Geschichte, Importe
Rubrik: Geisteswissenschaften
Medium: Taschenbuch
Inhalt: Einband - flex.(Paperback)
ISBN-13: 9780307476456
ISBN-10: 0307476456
Sprache: Englisch
Einband: Kartoniert / Broschiert
Autor: Lepore, Jill
Hersteller: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Verantwortliche Person für die EU: Libri GmbH, Europaallee 1, D-36244 Bad Hersfeld, gpsr@libri.de
Maße: 203 x 132 x 17 mm
Von/Mit: Jill Lepore
Erscheinungsdatum: 26.03.2013
Gewicht: 0,361 kg
Artikel-ID: 133764178

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