Briefly Perfectly Human: Making an Authentic Life by Getting Real About the End by Alua Arthur
Although humans have been dying as long as we’ve been living on the earth, death continues to come as an unwelcome shock to most of us. There is, however, a growing contingent of mortals eager to shift the cultural stance on death away from petrified denial and towards something more like acceptance, if not embrace or affection. In the vanguard of this “death positive” movement are death doulas, who provide companionship, emotional support, and guidance to individuals preparing for the end. And at the fore of the death doula vanguard is Alua Arthur. Probably the only celebrity death doula in the business, Arthur makes regular media appearances and speaks at conferences to nudge the public and care professionals alike along in redefining their relationship with death and dying. How might our lives change if we faced human mortality honestly and with equanimity, even curiosity, she asks, rather than painstakingly avoiding the subject: avoiding talking about it, avoiding thinking about it, avoiding planning for it. Briefly Perfectly Human is equal parts memoir and death positivity primer, interweaving reflections on Arthur’s path to what some might consider her morbid vocation with stories from the thousands of deaths she has attended in her career. Empathetic and impassioned, the book offers space for readers to ease into contemplation of death’s place in their own lives, as the tenebrous destiny that awaits us all.
For amateur thanatologists, the tentatively death positive, and fans of Caitlin Doughty.
Our Kindred Creatures: How Americans Came to Feel the Way They Do About Animals by Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy
Try to call to mind the major American social struggles of the 19th century, the ones you learned about in history class. Abolition? Women’s suffrage? The labor movement? Less likely to be on your list is the crusade against animal cruelty—but, as Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy admirably document in Our Kindred Creatures, the early animal welfare movement was closely entwined with these more prominent campaigns. Focusing on the period between 1866 and 1896, the authors explain how the fight for animal rights rode in on the wave of reformist zeal that followed the Civil War, when abolitionists, in need of a new cause now that slavery outlawed, shifted their energies to the maltreatment of so-called “lesser beasts.” Early women’s rights activists were also among the first leaders of the anti-vivisection movement, while the plight of workers in the Midwest’s harrowing meatpacking plants drew attention to the horrors the industry inflicted on animals as well as humans. Our Kindred Creatures spotlights the key battles – campaigns against horse-drawn streetcars in New York City and the slaughter of Philadelphia’s stray dogs, for example, or the protests launched to call off the U.S. military’s policy of shooting down bison from speeding trains – and trailblazers of the “moral revolution” that initiated the long, still ongoing slog toward shifting hearts and minds in the direction of justice for all creatures.
For animal history buffs, trackers of social progress, and fans of Wasik and Murphy’s previous book, the remarkable Rabid: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Diabolical Virus (2012).
