Category: Uncategorized
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All My Wild Mothers
All my Wild Mothers: Motherhood, Loss and an Apothecary garden is a memoir written by Victoria Bennett. Previously Bennet wrote the poetry collection To Start the Year from Its quiet Centre which focused on the dying and death of her mother. In many ways her mother’s death fits in the natural order of things; at…
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Stay True
Do you ever wish you could return to a period of time that you have experienced in your life time, but at a different age? I was born in 1989 and thus a child in the 90s. As this decade is more and more the topic of contemporary popular culture I have an increased nostalgic…
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Mr. Humble & Dr. Butcher
In The Butchering Art historian Lindsey Fitzharris wrote about Joseph Lister, the surgeon we need to thank for antiseptic practices used in contemporary surgical practices. Lister transformed Victorian Medicine and likely paved the way for Dr Robert White to embark on the exploration described in Mr Humble & Dr Butcher: A Monkey’s Head, the Pope’s…
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With the End in Mind
It’s been a little while since I have written a review, but I am happy to tell you that I am writing this one from a lovely town in Cornwall. I haven’t been to the UK since the start of the pandemic but returned earlier this month. Up until March 2020 I was busy doing…
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Dead Babies and Seaside Towns
October 9-15 marks pregnancy and baby loss awareness week. It is remarkable how little space there is to discuss baby loss despite how incredibly common it is. Michelle Obama miscarried, so did Meghan Markle. Thinking of the women in my close circle, who have tried to have a baby, most of them have experienced some…
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This Party’s Dead
As a Death Scholar, I have to admit that reading the synopsis of This Party’s Dead. Grief Joy and Spilled Rum at the World’s Death Festivals made me real jealous, real fast. Visiting death festivals around the globe sounds like a dream holiday. The reason Erica Buist started this endeavour was not a cheerful one,…
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Everything Changed: a book for children affected by suicide
As we continue to pay attention to Suicide Awareness Month, we turn to Everything changed. A book for children affected by suicide¸ written by Mia, Robin and Jasper Scally. They lost their husband and father to suicide and co-wrote a book about their experiences. In 2014, the year their dad died, Robin and Jasper couldn’t…
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Surviving the tsunami of grief
There are moments in history that have such an impact that you know exactly where you were at that point in time. 9/11 is one of those moments. For me the tsunami in South East Asia in 2004 is another. Known as the Boxing Day Tsunami, an earthquake in the Indian Ocean subsequently led to…
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Lieve Oma Pluis
Three days after flying back from Amsterdam to Finland, I flew back from Finland to Amsterdam again, as my best friend’s mum was dying. Diagnosed with terminal cancer, she had been dying for a while, but now she was ‘dying dying’. In the end she had a gekozen dood, a chosen death, I will probably…
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Dark Archives
One thing I like about the field of Death Studies is that there are always new things to learn about, and to discover interesting, albeit obscure, phenomena I had never heard of, or considered to be ‘a thing’. Librarian Megan Rosenbloom’s book Dark Archives: a librarian’s investigation into the science and history of books bound…
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Notes on Grief
In Notes on Grief Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie writes about the shock and profound impact of the loss of her father James Nwoye Adichie. Adichie recounts childhood memories, reflects on her relationship with her father and the difficulties of grieving and mourning during a global pandemic. Adichie’s father died of complications caused by kidney failure, an…
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The Unmourned
The premise of the Unmourned offers the reader a very interesting ethical dilemma: Do people in prison ‘deserve’ funerals after they die, and if so, what type of funeral? I must confess that I found the premise of the book, and pondering about this issue, more interesting than the actual book itself. At the start…
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The Unmourned
The premise of the Unmourned offers the reader a very interesting ethical dilemma: Do people in prison ‘deserve’ funerals after they die, and if so, what type of funeral? I must confess that I found the premise of the book, and pondering about this issue, more interesting than the actual book itself. At the start…
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The Pull of the Stars
This blog was originally published April 19, 2021 As we are still in the midst of a global pandemic, it is very timely that my first review looks at a book that focuses on a different pandemic: the flu pandemic of 1918. This pandemic is estimated to have infected 500 million people, a third of…