All of Us - Hardcover

Anderson, Patricia

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385312784 ISBN 13: 9780385312783

Publisher: Delacorte Press, 1996

Synopsis

Tell me how you die and I will tell you who you are. It's an ancient adage, oft-repeated and profoundly true. When we talk about death, we are talking about a great many other things -- our longings, our fears, our sense of identity, perhaps even what we want from life. Even as Supreme Court cases are argued and suicide machines devised, as debates rage in the press on long-term care costs and terminal management, another, vastly more important dialogue is also taking place. And that dialogue reflects deeper feelings and beliefs, combining ancient knowledge and new science. Sooner or later everybody dies, after all. Could death be different than it is for most people now? Could it be better?

In Patricia Anderson's illuminating collection of interviews, she examines this universal subject with insight, tenderness, even humor. Here are over sixty American voices -- from gang kids to film makers, Native American shamans to robotics engineers -- expressing their beliefs about our only true common bond. Some are people in the public eye, like author Isabel Allende, performance artist Laurie Anderson, and physician Andrew Weil. Others are more private citizens. But all of them eloquently reveal a rich variety of experiences, feelings, and beliefs about death. Vital, life-affirming, and moving, this vivid exploration is a treasury of wisdom and insight, guiding us as we bury our elders, raise our kids, and move on down the line.

About this title

From the Publisher

"All of Us opens a window on one of our last taboos, how we feel about dying. Patricia Anderson penetrates the veil created by our culture's denial of death, and offers us penetrating insights into the many ways people's hearts and spirit meet life's last challenge." --Daniel Goleman, author, Emotional Intelligence

From the Back Cover

When I was around four or five my grandmother died. I don't recall what I was told but I do remember the loss, the fact that she was not there.... What I did was -- I invented a ghost that lived in the curtains in the living room ... heavy velvet curtains in a sort of red wine color. They never moved them, probably because they were full of dust, and I had the idea that the spirit of my grandmother lived in the curtains, so I would pin little messages for her inside them. I created a protective spirit, a benevolent angel that was my grandmother.

-- Isabel Allende, Author

As a child, I was taught that when you die you go to heaven, and there's a kind of weighing of what you did on earth. In heaven you are yourself, but also there's this shape that you become as the result of your attitudes, your actions...like the way you were on earth is the mold for who you become. I didn't have any problem believing that there was a life after death because it seemed to me that human beings were too amazing to just disappear into nothing.

-- Lee Davis, Teacher

I find it bard to muster up belief in the notion of extinction at death because I can think of too many alternatives. Mathematically there are simply, so many possibilities that the simplest one, the idea that the world is exactly the way it seems -- a purely physical thing -- becomes highly unlikely....It's much more likely that we are, in some form or another, immortal.

-- Hans Moravec, Robotics Scientist

About this edition

• Publisher: Delacorte Press
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0385312784
• ISBN 13: 9780385312783
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 364