Death in War and Peace: Loss and Grief in England, 1914-1970. By Pat Jalland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. xii plus 317 pp. $55.00)
2011; Oxford University Press; Volume: 45; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/jsh/shr133
ISSN1527-1897
Autores Tópico(s)Grief, Bereavement, and Mental Health
ResumoDoes life have to be, as Thomas Hobbes would have it, “nasty, brutish, and short”? Not according to the “immortalists” in our midst. I am not referring to those who believe that the souls of “true believers” (of any number of religions) will be rewarded with eternal life in the hereafter. Rather, modern immortalists are cryonics, an elite band of men and women who have paid a minimum of $29,250 to have their bodies cooled and preserved in liquid nitrogen immediately after death, in preparation for a physical resurrection here on earth in the future. The birth-myth of the cryonic movement typically begins with Robert Ettinger's brush with mortality as a soldier during the Second World War. Its youthful manifesto emerged in the 1960s, when Ettinger published The Prospect of Immortality (1962) and the first immortalist societies were established, and it entered into early adulthood with the opening of the...
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