iUniverse, 284 pages, (paperback) $21.95, 9781475969771
(Reviewed: September, 2013)
In Confronting Death, University of Rhode Island professor Alfred G. Killilea teams with a former student to collect 18 undergraduate essays written for his course on “The Politics of Being Mortal.” Specific topics range from Dante’s Divine Comedy to mountaineering, but the overall focus is on “death as a way of understanding how to live.”
The collection begins unpromisingly with an essay by co-editor Dylan D. Lynch, whose purported subject (Kurt Vonnegut’s early novel Player Piano) seems to have so little to say about mortality that the author is forced to shoehorn in a variety of strained connections, such as the assertion that a character’s decision to quit his job “is perfectly analogous to our current societal problem with facing death.”
This isn’t the only piece to display an unfortunate tendency to declare positions instead of backing them with evidence. In addition, the collection presents distracting errors in spelling and grammar, such as using “boarder” for “border” and indiscriminately employing past and present tenses within sentences involving a single time frame.
There is some strong material here, particularly in the sections on terrorism, child soldiers, street gangs, and fascism. These essays, concerning people who either welcome death for religious reasons or have been numbed by its constant presence in their lives, suggest the unnerving possibility that accepting the reality of one’s own death—usually praised as a healthy development—in some cases instills contempt for the lives of others and encourages the unhesitating use of deadly violence. However, it’s regrettably characteristic of this book that a smart analysis of Japanese attitudes towards suicide is followed by the cloudily titled and argued “Suicidology—A Philosophy.”
The editors have amassed a scattershot array of essays whose sincerity and seriousness are palpable, while too often falling short of enlightening.
Also available as an ebook.
Author’s Current Residence
Kingston, Rhode Island
Source: BlueInk Reviews
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