Suicide Books

Janet Todd masterfully reconstructs the story of Mary Wollstonecraft's daughter Fanny, a girl whose shadowy and tragic life was lived at the interstices of the lives of several geniuses. In addition to her mother, there was her stepfather, the philosopher William Godwin, and her half-sister Mary Godwin. And the poets Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron were also involved in this story of a young woman who, ignored and unloved, and with a burdensome history, committed suicide at the age of twenty-one.

Although little is known about Fanny, Todd painstakingly reconstructs her movements and imagines what her feelings must have been in her melodramatic circumstances. These events have been recounted many times - but never before told from Fanny's viewpoint. This account of the poets and their circle of female acolytes reads like a novel. Todd presents the actions of Shelley and his circle in the context of what she calls a new, emerging cult of genius. "Genius was venerated, and seen as exempt from "the moral and social principles that governed everyday humanity...Genius was a new form of aristocracy."

Mary Wollstonecraft died shortly after her marriage to Godwin and the birth of their daughter Mary, who could not, as Todd observes, have been an easy sister for Fanny to have. This was a family of which it was said, "if you cannot write an epic poem, or a novel that by its originality knocks all other novels on its head, you are a despicable creature not worth acknowledging." At 16, the brilliant Mary eloped with Shelley, with whom her father was involved in a "parasitic tie." Godwin believed the world owed him a living, and Shelley was his disciple and his financial patron. Ironically, Godwin was horrified to see his own principles of free love coming home to roost with a vengeance when Shelley seduced his teenage daughter.

Shelley had what Todd calls "the cult-leader's ability to draw young women of middle class background not simply into his bed but into the insecurity and infamy of an itinerant sexual commune." He already had a wife, having run away with 16-year-old Harriet Westbrook in 1811. Harriet was the mother of one child and expecting another, when he deserted her for Mary. According to Mrs. Godwin, not only Mary, but her younger stepsister Claire Clairmont, as well as Fanny, were infatuated with the charismatic genius. Fanny was away visiting relatives, when Shelley and Mary eloped, taking Claire with them. When Shelley, Mary and Claire returned to England, Fanny, distraught by their quarrels with Godwin, decided to take her future in her own hands. Traveling to Bath, she met with Shelley, who evidently rejected her. Poor and dependent, she felt that nothing remained for her but death. Her mother's biological legacy told on her, and she had grown up with the idea of suicide, which Godwin held was no sin. As Todd says, both Godwin and Shelley wrote of suicide, but "it was left to their womenfolk to succeed at it." And so Fanny Wollstonecraft was found dead in a coaching inn in Swansea, having taken laudanum. She left a suicide note, but mysteriously, the signature was torn off. As nobody claimed the body, she was buried in a pauper's grave. Todd conjectures that Shelley himself was responsible for destroying the signature, and suppressing Fanny's identity.

Fanny's life has long been obscure, but the detective work Janet Todd has done is intuitive and insightful in revealing her in her own right, and in the context of a brilliant impression of this circle of young people, geniuses and otherwise. The entitled behavior of the aristocratic Shelley and Byron, and the attachment of their "groupie" girls, brings to mind a modern cult. It is through these high dramatic and literary events that we can begin to glimpse the sad life of Fanny Wollstonecraft Godwin.

I came to this book with a condescending snicker on my face. I was sure it would rattle through old platitudes and moral hype, but it immediately challenged that point of view with clear and compelling evidence that assisted suicide is, and has been, a very bad idea for the vulnerable and depressed. Johnston tells the story of the Hemlock Society and its founder, Derek Humphry; factual and chilling. Kevorkian is skewered by his own words. The Dutch experiment is documented exhaustively and it is clearly something we wouldn't want to try. The threat of manipulating older people (perhaps for their money, perhaps because we're just tired of hearing them chatter) is in fact very real. I liked the historical overview, the tasteful graphics, the liner notes, and the Qand A section. I particularly liked the stuff on copy-cat suicide and Courtney Love! This book is not dry and stiff, it's actually pretty cool. Neat cover too

The Rev Jim Jones is so right about everything he says. This book should be read by everybody considering mass worship, it has certainly changed mine and Ood's lives. A must for every serious cult fan...

The Death Of Kings: Royal Deaths In Medieval England by Michael Evans (Medieval History, Christ Church College, Canterbury, England) is an extensive, scholarly, and highly accessible account of all that is know about the deaths of medieval royalty, whether natural, by accident, or by murder. Demonstrating how writers of the era (and later) drew upon such deaths and gave them symbolic qualities that transcended the events of history, The Death Of Kings is a welcome and recommended addition to Medieval History Studies in general, and British Monarchial History collections in particular.

"This book is a wonderful introduction and guide to the important questions and issues that arise on the subject of death with dignity. It has all the qualities one could wish for in a good friend: warmth, wisdom, humanity, humor, support, and practical information. It's life affirming, and it quotes poetry, philosophy, and spiritual writings. I highly recommend it to anyone making end-of-life decisions, anyone thinking about such matters for the future, and anyone supporting individuals facing such decisions." --- Judith R. Gordon, Ph.D. Clinical Professor of Psychology University of Washington

"There are many books published these days which deal with `end-of-life' issues - but none are wiser or more informative than Death With Dignity FAQs. This is essential reading for anyone with questions about the current legal and medical aspects of dying well." --- John Hofsess Executive Director of The Right to Die Society of Canada

"Here's a rich ore of vital information for the thoughtful and investigative reader." --- Derek Humphry Author of 'Final Exit'

This is the definitive book on the rationale for the right to die. When the 900 member Washington Psychological Association and the fifty-five thousand member American Counseling Association filed their Friend of the Court brief with the Supreme Court of the United States, this book was the only one "lodged with the Clerk," making it available to the Justices in entirety.

The author, Dr. Rob Neils, is the founder and president of the Dying Well Network. He did the first ever group psychotherapy for terminally ill persons and wrote the first doctoral dissertation on the treatment of grief. He is a clinical psychologist in private practice in Spokane, Washington.

Describing a great variety of funeral ritual, from major world religions and from local traditions, this book shows how cultures not only cope with corpses but also create an added value for living through the growth of afterlife beliefs.

The explosion of interest in death in recent years reflects the key theme of this book -- the rhetoric of death -- the way cultures use the most potent weapon of words to bring new power to life.

Human identity and its transformation through mortuary rites are explored through the mummies of Chile and Egypt, African sacrificial deaths, Indian cremations, immigrant cemeteries in the U.S., ancestor rites in Eastern religions and in Mormonism, and the freeing of the dead in cryonics.

New research findings are presented on cremation and afterlife beliefs, especially reincarnation, sensing the presence of the dead and the death of pets in Britain, to show how mortuary rituals are constantly changing in response to death as a major feature of the human environment.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Douglas J. Davies is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Nottingham. As director of research projects on both cremation and burial, he has undertaken the most extensive gractical study of these topics conducted in Britain. Many of the results are incorporated in this book.

[Front cover illustration: 'Faithful' by Charles Edward Perugini (1939-1918).]

Lighthearted, educational and fun to read, this is an entertaining book. Perfect reading for the bathroom or on the subway.

Unlike anything that has previously appeared in print, this is an absolutely unique publication. This defense of suicide is as deep as it is broad, citing innumerable positive instances occurring over thousands of years and in various cultures across the planet.

The author, refers to cultural, religious, philosophical, literary and popular sources, and argues from the historical record as well as current evidence. He recommends that suicide, once an honored and honorable act, should be returned to the approved status it once enjoyed. It is an interesting juxtaposition that such a book should come from the author and performer of acclaimed one-person plays on Gandhi, Thoreau, and Whitman (copies only available for sale from the author himself).

Once again I'm writing here a review of one of the most experts in suicidology - Shneidman, Edwin, Ph.D. Dr. Shneidman, the father of Suicidology is the right person write about the defintion of suicide. It is a valuable resource for both students and professional in the mental health area. As Litman, M.D. said - "...this is an epic book of scholarship...", and it surely is. From the characteristics of suicide to an historical view, and a most educational book, I would say that this masterpeace is unique in its scope and content and with no doubt worth reading.

Denial of the Soul is one of those books of rare insight about the human condition. The author shares the distillation of experience, concern about death, the nature of euthanasia, and life itself. Peck's book is not a diatribe against euthanasia but a subtle examination of how human nature shapes our deaths and how our choices about death ultimately strip bear our grip on life. The book is also a straw in the wind of the cultural war that flares all too often in the U.S. Peck characterizes himself as a Christian but does not then procede to pick up the cudgels of fundamentalism to batter the secular barbarians who may disagree with him. Peck's Christianity is tempered with more than a little humility and a keen awareness that he might be wrong from time to time. Peck does use this volume to speak against the notion that the whole of a human is immeasurably greater than the sum of the biochemical parts. He passionately argues that just as quantum mechanics limits what we can measure and describe with certainty, the nature of the human soul masks depths and purposes that also remain hidden. The decision to prematurely end a life, to short-cut a soul strikes Peck as a risky endeavour. Denial of the Soul is more than a discourse on euthanasia and sadly may be ignored because it is neither a strident attack on secular valuses nor a staunch defense of conservative Christianity. The book is far more than that, it is about life and the choices all of us make.