(12 reviews) Author: ISBN : Product Detai New from Format: PDFRenowned Harvard scholar and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore has composed 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 17th-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.
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 8 hours and 41 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: Brilliance Audio
- Audible.com Release Date: June 5, 2012
- Whispersync for Voice: Ready
- Language: English
- ASIN: B0088UTPPK
The Mansion of Happiness: A History of Life and Death PDF
The guiding metaphor of this book is a board game -- or more properly, the evolution of a particular game from iteration to iteration.By Book Mark
The game was called Mansion of Happiness. The goal of the game was to reach Heaven -- or the Mansion of Happiness. It encouraged virtues like honesty, temperance and purity. It had its own origin in ancient eastern games of fate and karma. Milton Bradley, the great game designer, based his own The Game of Life on the Mansion of Happiness. But instead of celebrating the traditional virtues, he celebrated the American ones -- Industry, Thrift, etc.
Just as this game has changed through the centuries, so have our views of the passage of life itself. This book tracks the changing views of the stages of life in America.
The book is broken up into chapters, each exploring a stage of life, and America's changing views. In each chapter, the author looks at a couple of thinkers or historical figures. The author explores the historical transition from a cyclical view of life to a linear one.
Highly recommended for the interesting twists and turns of thought and history, for the intriguing connections between apparently unrelated themes, and for a truly thought-provoking look at the questions we ask about life. This book will make you reconsider what it is to live.
The Mansion of Happiness can't decide what it wants to be. With a subtitle like A History of Life and Death, this book has license to be about, well, everything. Or, in other words, nothing specific.By Daniel Estes
The beginning at least shows promise with some background info on board game pioneer Milton Bradley and the evolution of what our games tell us about ourselves. And then there's a chapter on breastfeeding. And then one on children's rights and children's libraries. And then a potpourri of subjects such as sex, politics, women's rights, workplace efficiency (?), motherhood, family planning, contraception and cryogenics. I get that we're meant to progress through the stages of life, but very little about one topic links with the next. My recommendation is to forget about discovering any overarching theme, and instead approach this work as a collection of essays.
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