NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • An "extraordinary ... profoundly moving" history (The New York Times Book Review) of the American Civil War that reveals the ways that death on such a scale changed not only individual lives but the life of the nation. An estiated 750,000 soldiers lost their lives in the American Civil War. An equivalent proportion of today's population would be seven and a half million. In This Republic of Suffering, Drew Gilpin Faust describes how the survivors managed on a practical level and how a deeply religious culture struggled to reconcile the unprecedented carnage with its belief in a benevolent God. Throughout, the voices of soldiers and their families, of statesmen, generals, preachers, poets, surgeons, nurses, northerners and southerners come together to give us a vivid understanding of the Civil War's most fundamental and widely shared reality. With a new introduction by the author, and a new foreword by Mike Mullen, 17th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
How do we respond to a patient or loved one facing death with all of our mind and heart, yet without trying to feel pain or emotions that are not our own? The person approaching death does not need us to live through their pain but to offer a creative response to suffering that is rooted in respect and reverence. From the author's perspective as an Orthodox Christian (and that of her mentor, the late physician and bishop Met. Anthony Bloom) hospice caregiver Frederica de Graaf shares her conviction that death is an entry into Life and shows how family, friends, clergy, and medical staff can support a dying person of any age, creed, or circumstance.
Offers an inspirational and compassionate approach to understanding the problems of life, and argues that we should continue to believe in God's fairness.
Gillian Rose was a star academic, acclaimed as one of the most dazzling and original philosophers today (Edward Said was among those who said we MUST publish this). But Gillian also had cancer, and the news that she only had months to live made her determined to explore who she was, and what she had been seeking so long. LOVE'S WORK is as vivid and carefully structured as a novel, circling like memory from the small fierce girl torn between a demanding father and genial, feckless stepfather to the adolescent confronting her Jewish inheritance, from the passionate friend to the searcher for truth, from the sensual woman in love to the patient in the hospital bed. Passionate funny, heartbreakingly honest, LOVE'S WORK faces death in a way that is almost exhilarating: genuinely unforgettable.
In the third edition of Jewish Views of the Afterlife, Rabbi Simcha Paull Raphael walks readers through the Jewish tradition of the afterlife while providing insights into spiritual care with dying and grieving individuals and families.
Over 16 million copies sold worldwide 'Every human being should read this book' Simon Sinek One of the outstanding classics to emerge from the Holocaust, Man's Search for Meaning is Viktor Frankl's story of his struggle for survival in Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps. Today, this remarkable tribute to hope offers us an avenue to finding greater meaning and purpose in our own lives.
Love’s Work is at once a memoir and a work of philosophy. Written by the English philosopher Gillian Rose as she was dying of cancer, it is a book about both the fallibility and the endurance of love, love that becomes real and lasting through an ongoing reckoning with its own limitations. Rose looks back on her childhood, the complications of her parents’ divorce and her dyslexia, and her deep and divided feelings about what it means to be Jewish. She tells the stories of several friends also laboring under the sentence of death. From the sometimes conflicting vantage points of her own and her friends’ tales, she seeks to work out (seeks, because the work can never be complete—to be alive means to be incomplete) a distinctive outlook on life, one that will do justice to our yearning both for autonomy and for connection to others. With droll self-knowledge (“I am highly qualified in unhappy love affairs,” Rose writes, “My earliest unhappy love affair was with Roy Rogers”) and with unsettling wisdom (“To live, to love, is to be failed”), Rose has written a beautiful, tender, tough, and intricately wrought survival kit packed with necessary but unanswerable questions.
The most ambitious work of fiction by a writer widely considered the most important novelist working in China today In this darkly comic novel, a group of women inhabits a world of constant surveillance, where informants lurk in the flowerbeds and false reports fly. Conspiracies abound in a community that normalizes paranoia and suspicion. Some try to flee—whether to a mysterious gambling bordello or to ancestral homes that can only be reached underground through muddy caves, sewers, and tunnels. Others seek out the refuge of Nest County, where traditional Chinese herbal medicines can reshape or psychologically transport the self. Each life is circumscribed by buried secrets and transcendent delusions. Can Xue's masterful love stories for the new millennium trace love's many guises—satirical, tragic, transient, lasting, nebulous, and fulfilling—against a kaleidoscopic backdrop drawn from East and West of commerce and industry, fraud and exploitation, sex and romance.