Will the Circle Be Unbroken? : Reflections on Death and Dignity - Softcover

Studs Terkel

4.13

582 ratings by Goodreads

9781862075603: Will the Circle Be Unbroken? : Reflections on Death and Dignity

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1862075603 ISBN 13: 9781862075603

Publisher: Granta Books, 2003

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We will all die. Yet modern culture fears and avoids the subject of death. This book deals sensitively with a universal experience. Studs Terkel explores the ultimate human experience, that of death and the possibility of life afterward. Death is the one experience we all share but cannot know. In "Will the Circle be Unbroken?", a wide range of people address the final experience and its impact on the present in which we live. As well as the elderly and the sick, Terkel uses his talent to draw on the experiences of those who work closely with the dying - paramedics, police, fire-fighters, doctors and the recently bereaved. In talking about the ultimate and unknowable culmination in our lives, these people give voice to their deepest beliefs and hopes, reflecting on the lives they have led and what still lies before them. The result is a universal and moving account of death and religion.

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About the Author:

Studs Terkel is the author of many books of oral history, including Working. He won the Pulitzer Prize for The Good War. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Review:

Thirty years ago Gore Vidal suggested to Studs Terkel that death would be a good subject for oral history; it's a subject which, after all, nobody can talk about with any genuine authority. Will the Circle be Unbroken is the result - Terkel has compiled the views and experiences of 63 death professionals (doctors, nurses, soldiers, detectives, murderers) and death amateurs (all of us, death professionals included). For all the variety of life-experience that it contains, the book is reassuringly repetitive; we all fear much the same thing and cope with it in much the same way. A poignant contribution to the neglected literature of death that is also, of course, a handbook to living well, a guide to making the most of death's long prelude.

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