Suicide Books

Reaktion books are exceptionally high quality both in their art reproductions and in the well researched content. Ron Brown, the author, is an academically-oriented suicidologist and although this can make for a difficult read, it was not a dry one and he did an excellent job of explaining his subject without pretension.

The book explores depictions of suicide through art from the Greco-Roman era (with the first piece being of Ajax's "heroic" suicide) to 20th century work such as the seemingly emotionless style of Andy Warhol and the actual photography of the Heaven's Gate cult's mass suicide. He also touches briefly on 21st century art.

Along with the artwork and Brown's interpretations (and that of others), he puts the pieces into historical context and comments on the legal and social opinions and reactions to suicide. What perhaps is infuriating for this reader is the long expanse of time when suicide was considered "feminine" - the woman being depicted as weak, prone to "the easy way out," and so on. And yet, throughout this period historical evidence seemed to show that men were the ones commiting self-murder the majority of the time. For women it was a solution to unrequited love or something equally as emotional. For men it was an answer to the pressures of work, status, and other "noble" pursuits. However offensive this may be from the standpoint of modern day feminism, it is a fascinating piece of history.

Also of interest is the Jesus/Judas dichotomy. Judas having commited suicide by hanging led to hanging being both a form of suicide and a punishment for criminals of the most basest character. Jesus' crucifixion on the other hand, and the suicides of martyrs, were considered forms of "good" deaths. Interpretations of this sort, and those of influential historical figures like St. Augustine, characterized the interpretations of suicide within society for far, far too long. The time period when religion dictated morality was an especially harsh time for the interpretation of suicides.

I was somewhat unhappy with the predominance of post-modernist interpretation even in those times when post-modernism had yet to surface. Foucault is often referenced and this leaves a certain skepticism about the author's opinions. I was also surprised by the detailed interpretations given some of the art pieces - the question being raised: how do you know? What appear rather explicable works of art are shown to have all sorts of hidden complexities and though they certainly made sense and were of great interest, how can we be sure this is what the artist meant to convey? I was also rather disappointed that many of the pieces of art referenced were not included in the book. I understand how difficult it would be to include each piece but, sadly, the average reader would have no other way of viewing them - especially without reference of where the pieces are to be found. How wonderful it would be if Reaktion - or Taschen or Phaidon Press would take up the task of working with Brown to reproduce every painting in one collection (without the necessity of text besides title, artist, and source.)

I also hoped to see reference to the works of Bosch (especially Mad Meg), Bruegel, Dali, and Francis Bacon.. but they weren't included.

The book is a very welcome addition to my collection on the topic and I highly recommend it to both art lovers and those intrigued by the subject matter.

It's very, very odd; very, very imaginative and until this edition returned it to print, it was very, very hard-to-find.

Arthur Byron Cover's AUTUMN ANGELS is set in an Earth of the far, far future where, in the wake of some crisis that nearly wiped out humankind, the survivors were granted godlike powers by an alien race called the "bems." Through a lack of imagination (or possibly through the Machiavellian machinations of the Other Fat Man; see below), most of the residents have taken on archetypal identities culled from popular fiction. You might recognize some of them... for example, the fat man in his white suit seems reminiscent of a certain character played by Sydney Greenstreet in THE MALTESE FALCON; the lawyer has a loathing of pigs and a sword cane, just like Theodore Marley Brooks, better known as "Ham" from the Doc Savage novels; and the other fat man and his witty leg man could have stepped out of one of Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe stories.

There are some wonderful literary games and joyful riffs on these pop archetypes... and there are wonderfully bizarre and imaginative journeys. You'll meet the Crawling Bird, the Cigar-Smoking Frogs, the green-furry ball creatures of the dullest planet in the universe, and the fish-with-legs who merely long to dance the night away.

It's all nailed together -- just barely -- by the story of the unlikely alliance of the lawyer, the fat man and the demon as they desperately attempt to rediscover Depression -- a state of mind long banished from the minds of godlike men, and one which the triumvirate believes is vital if the race is to ever rediscover a sense of purpose.

The book is filled with whimsical inventiveness and it frequently smash-cuts between phantastical fancies and more deeply thought, deeply felt moments. It's a wild trip, if one that has its flaws. (An artifact of the early '70s, it's filled with very peculiar little jokes and moments that must have seemed much more logical to a deeply stoned reader and/or writer.) But nonetheless, its mix of philosophy, fantasy and just plain fun makes it a natural fit for fans of books like GOOD OMENS (by Gaiman & Pratchett) and devotees of Douglas Adams' HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY books. (Its literary fun-'n'-games should also appeal to Philip Jose Farmer readers and fans of Alan Moore's LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN.)

The book has two "kind of" sequels by Arthur Byron Cover -- THE PLATYPUS OF DOOM & OTHER NIHILISTS (a collection of 4 novellas set in the same far future of AUTUMN ANGELS); and a more directly connected sequel, the truly excellent and deeply haunting AN EAST WIND COMING, which presents a darker vision of the world of godlike men: a reincarnation of Jack the Ripper stalks the Golden City, adding to a growing sense of malaise and despair, while the consulting detective slowly stirs from his torpor...

This book is a very effective guide to suicide. I have tried most of the methods myself, and I personally enjoyed burning myself to death the most. Many of my friends have tried falling to their deaths out of a window, and they said that it was rather painless.

This book started out amateurishly, and at first I felt that even the narrator's circumstances (she's just been admitted to a mental ward) didn't justify the uneven writing. -Sort of simple and melodramatic at the same time, with sentences like, "The rooms of the house are pale with emptiness," and the overuse of certain adjectives (notably "pale"). Plus the subject matter is threadbare. Institutionalized teen-aged girls have been a fad in YA fiction. Is Girl Inturrupted is to blame for this?

However, the writing soon evened out and the teen-aged narrator's voice began to come through so convincingly, I was able to forgive the book's minor faults. Events took place in the 60's or early 70's by my guess, with forays back into the main character's miserable childhood--suffering subtle and not-so-subtle abuse from parents and boarding-school staff.

There were shades of I Never Promised You a Rose Garden and Harriet the Spy in this book, but I was happy to see it swerve off in a new direction. Dewey made a multi-sided past and present for her narrator: the girl's hellish experiences with her parents took place at the same time as she was nourished by the love of her Hispanic nanny (with extended family), and by her freedom in the Arizona desert. The 18-year-old boy she meets in her ward is pitiable and kind, while truly (NOT romantic "tortured youth") crazy--at times scary and vindictive.

Borderlands' best moments came when it found its groove--it's really a love story. Dewey showed the healing power of love and friendship without the usual YA sentimentality. She made me feel it through the characters, rather than tacking it on as a moral along with a happy ending.

If the medical and period details are a little off-kilter, the emotional tones are beautifully subtle and realistic. I put Borderlands' problems down to its first-novel status. I'm eager to read more fiction by its author.

This is the memoir of the daughter of a woman who committed suicide in the late 1940s, when the author was nine. Signe's mother put Signe and her three older brothers to bed, hugging Signe a little longer than usual, went downstairs to her kitchen, set up the ironing board in front of the oven with the gas on, lay down on it, and died. When a spark from the refrigerator caused a boom in the kitchen, the kids all ran down and found their mother dead. Their father was working in New York, and living in the New Jersey house he was trying to get their mother to move to when it happened.

This event is told very objectively in the first chapter, but the book is compelling because it is a family's "deep map" tracing the psychic lines that lead to Signe's family situation, not just as the daughter of a suicidal woman, but as the daughter she is of the parents she had.

Signe's mother was quick to unpredictable rages, and her father seemed to equate love with money, both characteristics Hammer attributes to family situations and assumptions, going back to her paternal and maternal grandparents and beyond. She traces the disappointment of her mother's marriage to her father with pretty deft descriptions, writing how when her practical and ambitious father was courting her artistic and sensitive mother, he gave her beautiful art books and talked them over with her, causing her to think that she would be marrying a man with a good career and safe income, who would still be sensitive to her talents and needs. But when Hammer's father reveals himself over time as a selfish husband and father, moving the family repeatedly after jobs that forward his own career with the railroad, trying at the last to move them out of a house in Pennsylvania that Hammer's mother had made an emotional investment in (as opposed to many of the other places she'd lived).

The mistake Hammer's mother made about her father's lack of generosity are described by Hammer: "She made a mistake common to women: She believed that the lazy self-pleasuring of the table and, later, of the bed, were forms of generosity."

And so the unhappy marriage bumped along. Signe recounts the kind of constant dread she lived in when she was old enough to be conscious of the role she played in her family, the only girl, the only scapegoat for her mother's desires to be perfect and to perfect her daughter in her stead. Her brothers were in school, but Signe, home with her mother during the day, was cautious and sensitive to her mother's sudden rages and criticism. She sought to keep from bothering her mother, or needing her too much: "If I intruded, I might bring down her wrath. It was strict discipline for a toddler; I kept my eye on her, and she kept her back to me."

When her mother killed herself ("She left without leaving," Hammer writes), the family was uprooted again and again for a couple of years, until her father remarried and settled down with Signe and her new stepmother back in the house where her mother had died. (She also notes that her mother's last violence had effectively ruined her father's railroad and military career, keeping him from being promoted to general in the reserves and making vice president in his company.) She continues to tell the story of the all their relationships, and follows a short thread through her own adult years, her career, her desire not to marry, not to have children. This is the least interesting part of the book.

What I found to be the fundamental strength of this book, beyond the anger, beyond the violent central event of the narrative, was the idea that any family could write a book like this (though hopefully it wouldn't be as depressing!), because as one can trace a talent, a characteristic, a personality trait, or an eye color through geneaology, one can also trace these psychological undercurrents (or overt behaviors) to their eruption, for good or bad.

"How can we know, in the wheel of the self," Hammer writes, "what we have chosen and what is forced upon us? And why, when so much else is possible, are we doomed to live with choices made in terror and desperation, at an age so young the selves we make can never fit the fabric of a later, larger life?"

This paragraph needs to be only slightly rewritten to be considered by anyone in a family, as he or she considers the imprints of generations of choices and decisions have made on our own lives. Hammer's central event is dramatic and violent and obvious, but anyone's family characteristics and "symptoms" are much more emergent and "iterative" as my friend would say, and would fit this method of investigation. I think this book is a fascinating gateway to a deep consideration of such issues for each of us personally. I highly recommend it.

"The Case of the Constant Suicides" (1941) is a fun read and one of the author's more interesting mysteries--three men die and the reader must determine who committed suicide and who was murdered. This book is very much of a howdunit as well as a whodunit. Carr's serial detective, the humungous Dr. Gideon Fell, galumphs into view about a third of the way through, after one man is already mysteriously deceased. Old Angus Campbell meets his end after plunging out of the window of his locked tower bedroom. The door has to be broken down in order for the deceased man's bedroom to be examined. The only unusual object in the tower room is an empty animal carrier, its wire-mesh door tightly shut.

Professor of history, Alan Campbell and his second cousin Kathryn Campbell meet on the train taking them to Scotland and immediately dislike each other. Too bad, because they are forced to share a sleeping compartment on the crowded, blacked-out train. They bicker all the way to the Castle of Shira at Inverary where Angus had jumped or was forced from his bedroom window the previous week.

Here they meet the insurance agent, the Castle's lawyer, and Angus's brother Colin arguing about whether Angus was murdered or done himself in. Carr's serial detective, Dr. Gideon Fell wheezes and chuffs through the castle like an off-the-track steam engine, dropping mysterious hints as he goes. Colin decides to spend a night in his brother's former bedroom, just to lay rumors of ghostly goings-on, and he too defenestrates himself.

When a third man is found hanging in a locked fishing cabin, Dr. Fell sorts out the murder and attempted murder from the suicide, rewards the innocent, and sets a murderer free if only he will sign a fake confession.

John Dickson Carr takes a turn to heavy-handed humor in "The Case of the Constant Suicides." Most of the roistering is caused by a malt whiskey called 'the Doom of the Campbells.' A pesky American newspaperman is drenched, shot at, and hunted from the castle grounds whenever the Doom is flowing through the inhabitants of the castle. This isn't my favorite Gideon Fell mystery, but it was fun to read--more smiles than frissons of terror.

"The Case of the Constant Suicides" (1941) is a fun read and one of the author's more interesting mysteries--three men die and the reader must determine who committed suicide and who was murdered. This book is very much of a howdunit as well as a whodunit. Carr's serial detective, the humungous Dr. Gideon Fell, galumphs into view about a third of the way through, after one man is already mysteriously deceased. Old Angus Campbell meets his end after plunging out of the window of his locked tower bedroom. The door has to be broken down in order for the deceased man's bedroom to be examined. The only unusual object in the tower room is an empty animal carrier, its wire-mesh door tightly shut.

Professor of history, Alan Campbell and his second cousin Kathryn Campbell meet on the train taking them to Scotland and immediately dislike each other. Too bad, because they are forced to share a sleeping compartment on the crowded, blacked-out train. They bicker all the way to the Castle of Shira at Inverary where Angus had jumped or was forced from his bedroom window the previous week.

Here they meet the insurance agent, the Castle's lawyer, and Angus's brother Colin arguing about whether Angus was murdered or done himself in. Carr's serial detective, Dr. Gideon Fell wheezes and chuffs through the castle like an off-the-track steam engine, dropping mysterious hints as he goes. Colin decides to spend a night in his brother's former bedroom, just to lay rumors of ghostly goings-on, and he too defenestrates himself.

When a third man is found hanging in a locked fishing cabin, Dr. Fell sorts out the murder and attempted murder from the suicide, rewards the innocent, and sets a murderer free if only he will sign a fake confession.

John Dickson Carr takes a turn to heavy-handed humor in "The Case of the Constant Suicides." Most of the roistering is caused by a malt whiskey called 'the Doom of the Campbells.' A pesky American newspaperman is drenched, shot at, and hunted from the castle grounds whenever the Doom is flowing through the inhabitants of the castle. This isn't my favorite Gideon Fell mystery, but it was fun to read--more smiles than frissons of terror.

"The Case of the Constant Suicides" (1941) is a fun read and one of the author's more interesting mysteries--three men die and the reader must determine who committed suicide and who was murdered. This book is very much of a howdunit as well as a whodunit. Carr's serial detective, the humungous Dr. Gideon Fell, galumphs into view about a third of the way through, after one man is already mysteriously deceased. Old Angus Campbell meets his end after plunging out of the window of his locked tower bedroom. The door has to be broken down in order for the deceased man's bedroom to be examined. The only unusual object in the tower room is an empty animal carrier, its wire-mesh door tightly shut.

Professor of history, Alan Campbell and his second cousin Kathryn Campbell meet on the train taking them to Scotland and immediately dislike each other. Too bad, because they are forced to share a sleeping compartment on the crowded, blacked-out train. They bicker all the way to the Castle of Shira at Inverary where Angus had jumped or was forced from his bedroom window the previous week.

Here they meet the insurance agent, the Castle's lawyer, and Angus's brother Colin arguing about whether Angus was murdered or done himself in. Carr's serial detective, Dr. Gideon Fell wheezes and chuffs through the castle like an off-the-track steam engine, dropping mysterious hints as he goes. Colin decides to spend a night in his brother's former bedroom, just to lay rumors of ghostly goings-on, and he too defenestrates himself.

When a third man is found hanging in a locked fishing cabin, Dr. Fell sorts out the murder and attempted murder from the suicide, rewards the innocent, and sets a murderer free if only he will sign a fake confession.

John Dickson Carr takes a turn to heavy-handed humor in "The Case of the Constant Suicides." Most of the roistering is caused by a malt whiskey called 'the Doom of the Campbells.' A pesky American newspaperman is drenched, shot at, and hunted from the castle grounds whenever the Doom is flowing through the inhabitants of the castle. This isn't my favorite Gideon Fell mystery, but it was fun to read--more smiles than frissons of terror.

Well I like to read and I found that these books are good to read! They are because they give you information on stuff and it's fun to read. They give you information and problems other people have had and also help you get through your problems too! They help me through mine and will to yours too! I'm only 12 and I love to read these books for teens they help a lot.

_Confrontations with the Reaper_ is a good introduction to philosophical thinking. It is very well written and full of life. Many classroom discussions will pour from its pages.

The philosophy club at my college is using this text for a discussion along with Camus, Woody Allen, and _The Bagavad Gita_.

The only problem with it is that it is so analytic that it seems to suggest materialism as an idea human state to be in, but that's just my personal problem with the book.

If you're studying the philosophy of death or are in a college philosophy club this one's a great pick.