Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It

Hecht, Jennifer Michael

ISBN 10: 0300186088 / ISBN 13: 9780300186086

Published by Yale University Press, 2013

About this Item

Used book in good and clean conditions. Pages and cover are intact. Limited notes marks and highlighting may be present. May show signs of normal shelf wear and bends on edges. Item may be missing CDs or access codes. May include library marks. Fast Shipping. Seller Inventory # ZWM.HGIN

Bibliographic Details

Title: Stay: A History of Suicide and the ...

Publisher: Yale University Press

Publication Date: 2013

Binding: Hardcover

Condition: good

About this title

Synopsis:

Worldwide, more people die by suicide than by murder, and many more are left behind to grieve. Despite distressing statistics that show suicide rates rising, the subject, long a taboo, is infrequently talked about. In this sweeping intellectual and cultural history, poet and historian Jennifer Michael Hecht channels her grief for two friends lost to suicide into a search for history’s most persuasive arguments against the irretrievable act, arguments she hopes to bring back into public consciousness. From the Stoics and the Bible to Dante, Shakespeare, Wittgenstein, and such twentieth-century writers as John Berryman, Hecht recasts the narrative of our “secular age” in new terms. She shows how religious prohibitions against self-killing were replaced by the Enlightenment’s insistence on the rights of the individual, even when those rights had troubling applications. This transition, she movingly argues, resulted in a profound cultural and moral loss: the loss of shared, secular, logical arguments against suicide. By examining how people in other times have found powerful reasons to stay alive when suicide seems a tempting choice, she makes a persuasive intellectual and moral case against suicide.

Book Description:

How can we forestall the rising tide of suicides in the United States and worldwide? In this invaluable book, the author combs through the history of suicide to recover the most powerful arguments against the irretrievable act.