Alice Roosevelt, Linux, and Death

Approaching the end of the month, as we are, time to post a few also-reads:

Alice and the Assassin, R.J. Koreto. Entertaining historical fiction following the infamous pistol-packing Alice Roosevelt and her cowboy Secret Service bodyguard.  Following the assassination of President McKinely, Alice's father is made president and Alice herself turns detective. Declaring that it doesn't make sense for a feeble-minded Polish anarchist to randomly go after the president, Alice and Agent St. Clair begin following leads on their own -- to the faint horror of Alice's official guardians, Teddy excepting.   The chase takes them into private society clubs and public brothels, alike, consorting with the likes of Emma Goldman, Sicilian crimelords, and members  of the New York yacht club.   Most interesting is the relationship between St. Clair and Alice;  St. Clair is a former cavalrymen, former frontier sheriff turned federal agent, while Alice -- for all her wildness --  is a teenage girl who has been far more sheltered than she realizes. The two have an interesting fondness for one another by the end.

From Here to Eternity, by Caitlin Doughty, visits several cultures around the world to examine particularly interesting death customs, in a bid to convince western readers that pickling the dead and shoving them into an airtight vault at ludicrous costs to ourselves,   is neither normal nor attractive. Although  it doesn't have nearly the strength of her first book (Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, her account if becoming a mortician and developing a funerary style more in keeping with older customs. She promotes, for instance, the practice of families washing and dressing their deceased loved ones themselves, and taking part in the burial or pushing the button on the crematory. Traditions like those are those she explores here,  though she's naturally drawn to more...unusual death traditions, like people collecting and decorating human skulls to use as magical tokens, or  occasionally exhuming their dead kinfolk to  dress them and give them tea.  As with her previous book, this one is laden with humor, both in the writing and in happenstance; at one point Doughty was left alone in a cave of skulls and was stumbled upon by tourists, who immediately asked if they could take her picture in terms taken from Emily Post, circa 1915.    Although the book's contents were not as deep as the last one, I was cheered by the promotion of natural-burial movements within the US,  which is also covered here.

Open Life: The Philosophy of Open Source. Penned in 2004. Open Life offers a history of the open source software movement, an appraisal of its financial prospects, and a look at how the open source philosophy might be applied to matters other than software.  Admittedly, this is esoteric, and...dated. Most people use open source tech, even if they don't realize it: Android devices, for instance,  and even chromeOS, use Linux at their base,  as do many internet servers, and IOT devices will only bring more of it into people's homes.  A lot of the projects that Ingo mentions here (in examining different ways open-source software companies can be profitable while maintaining their roots)  have since been discontinued, though others (Red Hat) are still around.  One of the bigger success stories is Mozilla,  the first great challenger to Internet Explorer which has matured into Firefox. 


Finally, I also read my two classic club entries for this month, both by Walker Percy.  It turns out I'm not much for existentialist novels, even  if they are by a southern author.

Heavens on Earth

Heavens on Earth: The Scientific Search for the Afterlife, Immortality, and Utopia
pub. 2018 Michael Shermer
320 pages

Alone among the animals, human beings live in the knowing shadow of our own mortality.  It is rarely a specter which is embraced,  and escaping death has attracted more than its share of brainpower and creative force. In Heavens on Earth, Michael Shermer appraises religious, scientific, and somewhere-in-between attempts to deny the boatman his due.  Although winsomely varied and compassionately delivered,  Shermer's latest could have delivered more.

Although Heavens on Earth opens with a chapter on religious views of the afterlife,   the real heart of this book is what lays beyond. Obviously, the founder of Skeptic magazine won't be embracing ideas of heaven and hell, or reincarnation for that matter.  What attracted me to this book was the fact that Shermer also addresses scientific and political attempts to dodge mortality --  scientific, in the form of cyrogenics and transhumanism, and political in the form of creating utopias.  Although many people have had themselves frozen in time, in the hopes that one day a way to restore them to life without destroying their tissues will be invented,  that hasn't surfaced yet.   Anti-aging cures, too, are not just around the corner. Aging, like cancer, doesn't have one cause:  it's a collective name given to several things happening at once. Shermer doesn't believe human life can be extended realistically beyond 125-150 years.  (Not mentioned is the fact that even if we replace most of our innards with synthetic organs, we still can't stop our minds from going.)  Also covered in the scientific section are attempts to copy the mind digitally, and then recreate it -- but even we had the capacity to copy a mind in full (and the psychologist Shermer does not believe we do, given the sheer complexity of neural networks),  re-creating an active intelligence from that copy wouldn't preserve the original life.  It would create a new one, effectively.

The last section addresses utopias, and it is here that Shermer misses a step by only examining one family of utopian experiences in full, those associated with neo-tribal Nazism.   Guessing the reason why isn't difficult, as Shermer alludes to an uptick in neo-tribalism in the present day,  and covers the alt-right by name.  Connecting utopias to immortality is a bit of a stretch, but if one buys into a tribal or group identity strongly enough, then its story envelops one's own, and individual mortality is forgotten. It's well and good to point to the dangers of national socialism, but communism should have been included as well: it is equally utopian, and far more murderous historically speaking.  He may have also been influenced by a quoted review from George Orwell, who spoke to the lure of Nazism: while other worldviews promised comfort and hedonic pleasures, Nazism offered the invigoration of 'struggle, danger, and death'.  The human need for challenge is one Shermer revisits.

Ultimately, Shermer concludes, the only real answer to defeating the fear of death is to embrace life, and to make the most of what which we have. If you've ever taken to Star Trek, what Shermer suggests won't be surprising -- a life emphasizing connections to family, friends, and a political community, with individual goal, a little room for contemplation, and a decided place for awe of the cosmos.

Smoke Gets In Your Eyes

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory
© 2014 Caitlin Doughty
272 pages

Memento mori -- remember your death. Young Caitlin Doughty couldn't help but remember it; as a child she was traumatized by the memory of another girl her age plummeting to her death inside a shopping mall.  The event led to episodes of compulsive behavior as Caitlin did whatever she could to keep the Boatman at bay, whether that be avoiding stepping on newly-fallen leaves or drooling into her shirt.  A slightly older Caitlin, one facing adulthood, realized she had to face Death, too: so she started working at a crematory.   There, faced on a daily basis with faces of decay,  she began to realize that her unhealthy obsession with avoiding Death --  avoiding  facing the reality of it -- was endemic to modern society,  and began to chart a new course for herself, as someone who sought to help people deal with death in a more healthy manner.

Corpses aside, this is a funny book -- but one with a serious heart.  Caitlin uses her experiences at her first funeral home -- with a good bit of physical and morbid comedy as she learns the ropes --  to review how  death and funerary practices have changed in the United States,  and to explain what actually goes in during cremation or embalming.   For most of history, death was an everyday reality, inescapable. Disease and famine  were never far away, and when deaths happened they were handled within the home; family members saw to the final care of their loved ones' remains.   Death is  now shoved away into the recesses of our minds, hidden until a serious sickness or a sudden accident forces it into the light. Doughty argues that this is psychologically and socially unhealthy: not only is contemporary society obsessed with youth, but it fights death to the point of making itself miserable. Although we continue to defer death,  Our triumphs in modern medicine have produced a bitter victory: as societies become more proportionally populated by aging citizens,   we're left with a question:  where are the adults who will be taking care of these rising aged?  The numbers of geriatric physicians are falling, even as the need increases.   On a more practical level,  people's refusal to consider death means that when it happens,   few families are prepared for it, financially or otherwise.. Few can distinguish between what is legally necessary and what the funeral home recommends, and are cajoled into accepting burdensome fiscal obligations.

When Caitlin began working in a crematory,  it was a way to make money and face her fears. What it became, however, was a vocation, as she realized she wanted to help people manage death better.  Not only did she want to educate people about what happened to their bodies after death, but she wants to open eyes to the possibility of making death a meaningful part of life again.  It isn't necessary to eject people from their loved one's homes as soon as they perish, or pickle them and entomb them in vaults that seal them off from decay,   the author argues. The family can and should be part of the burial process; Caitlin's own funeral home now offers families the option to wash and dress the deceased themselves, as well as push the button that begins the cremation, which serves as a powerful moment of closure. She also explores the concept of green burials, which return allow human remains to be reclaimed by nature quickly and purposely.

I cannot recall how I stumbled on Doughty's YouTube channel ("Ask a Mortician").   which made me aware of this book, but I'm glad I did. Although it's often funny, Smoke Gets In Your Eyes is a work of tender reflection on the most haunting aspect of the human experience.  It's definitely one worth reading.

Related:
Love and Death: My Journey Through the Valley of the Shadow, F. Forrester Church
Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, Mary Roach

Stiff

Stiff: the Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
© 2003 Mary Roach
303 pages

Being dead is absurd. It's the silliest situation you'll find yourself in. Your limbs are floppy and uncooperative. Your mouth hangs open. Being dead is unsightly and stinky and embarrassing, and there's not a damn thing to be done about it.  - p.11

Stiff is a lively book about the dead -- odd, thoughtful, informative, and oddly funny. Over the course of a dozen chapters, Mary Roach finds out what becomes of us when we cease to be. Her journey starts in the world of science, where surgeons practice their art, drawing on the lessons of anatomists who were themselves taught by the dead. Vocational opportunities for corpses abound, particularly in testing automobile airbags and armaments.  Forensics specialists and other detectives find them particularly helpful. And then there are the odder uses people find for the recently deceased -- recreating the crucifixion of Jesus, or attempting to make severed heads come alive by supplying them with oxygenated blood.

My first thought after settling in to read this was that I should've saved it for Halloween:  part of the holiday is making light of death and other mysterious or frightening things. My reaction to death has always been fascination rather than fear, hence my attraction to this book. Even those who find death intimidating will be able to enjoy Mary Roach's approach: the book is saturated with dry humor, interesting tales, Roach's occasional tangents. She prefers a hands-on approach to investigation, taking the reader into embalming studios, body farms, Chinese mortuaries rumored to be the source of "human dumplings", and an abandoned laboratory where the first head transplants were attempted.

While readers can expect to learn quite a bit about the use of entomology in forensics,  the history of anatomy,  and the benefits of being a brain-in-a-jar, discovering how people who interact with decedents on a regular basis relate to their work fascinated me. Some objectify the dead, imagining them as a faceless mass of tissue, while others hold memorial services and give their subject bodies names. How the living relate to the dead is a major theme of the book, and another reason why I would've liked to read it around Halloween.

The information, humor, and musings make the book a memorably enjoyable experience, and I'd recommend it provided you aren't too squeamish. While Roach isn't gratuitously graphic, it's a book about dead bodies. Don't read the chapter on body farms if you're within three hours of a meal. I'll be reading more of Roach.,

Love and Death

Love and Death: My Journey Through the Vally of the Shadow
© F. Forrester Church 2008
145 pages



"Want what you have. Do what you can. Be who you are." - author's personal motto

When typing my comments for Our Chosen Faith: An Introduction to Unitarian Universalism, I visited the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations website and saw that one of the book's co-authors, F. Forrester Church, had recently died from cancer. I learned from his obituary that before his death he penned a book on death and dying called Love and Death. I was immediately interested in what a dying man had to say about the subject and decided to read it as my way of paying respects.

The theme of love and death was a common one for Church, having sermonized about it many times. He wrote in this book that when he was diagnosed with cancer, he became strangely anticipatory, describing himself as a student who had long studied for the examination of dying and wanted to see if he would prove worthy. Church believes that death is an essential part of the human experience, one that defines us and gives rise to religion -- which he defines as the human response to the twin truths of both being alive and having to die. After introducing the book, he delves into his history of death, reflecting on the deaths of friends and family that have marked his personal life and his service as a minister. He does this to establish why he views death with the grace he does, and once it is established he begins to speak as a minister -- offering meditations and advice.

The book appears to be written for those who are or who have loved ones who are dying, as well as to those who have recently lost loved ones. Neither of these categories apply to me, at least not to my knowledge, but still I was able to receive a great deal from his message. The book is very personal: it's not something one should read on the subway. The book isn't just read, it's experienced. I don't think I'll soon forget my own time spent reading it, and as a result of it I intend to read more of Church as I am able and recommend Love and Death to you.