Jill Lepore
David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American History
Harvard University | 209 Robinson Hall | Cambridge, MA 02138 | jill_lepore@harvard.edu
The Mansion of Happiness: A History of Life and Death
in
- Citation:
- Lepore, J. The Mansion of Happiness: A History of Life and Death. New York: Knopf, Forthcoming.
Abstract:
Renowned Harvard scholar and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore has written a strikingly original, ingeniously conceived and beautifully crafted history of American ideas about life and death from before the cradle to beyond the grave.
How does life begin? What does it mean? What happens when we die? “All anyone can do is ask,” Lepore writes. “That’s why any history of ideas about life and death has to be, like this book, a history of curiosity.” Lepore starts that history with the story of a seventeenth-century Englishman who had the idea that all life begins with an egg, and ends it with an American who, in the 1970s, began freezing the dead. In between, life got longer, the stages of life multiplied, and matters of life and death moved from the library to the laboratory, from the humanities to the sciences. Lately, debates about life and death have determined the course of American politics. Each of these debates has a history. Investigating the surprising origins of the stuff of everyday life—from board games to breast pumps—Lepore argues that the age of discovery, Darwin, and the Space Age turned ideas about life on earth topsy-turvy. “New worlds were found,” she writes, and “old paradises were lost.” As much a meditation on the present as an excavation of the past, The Mansion of Happiness is delightful, learned, and altogether beguiling.
Notes:
"Written with sardonic wit and penetrating intelligence, The Mansion of Happiness is a fascinating and startlingly original guide to the ways in which the human life-cycle has been imagined, manipulated, managed, marketed, and debased in modern times. Lepore weaves her way brilliantly along the mazy track that leads from the egg in which life’s game begins to the giant freezers in which certain crack-brained visionaries hope to defeat death itself. A fast-paced, hilarious, angry, poignant, and richly illuminating book."--Stephen Greenblatt, author of The Swerve: How the World Became Modern
"Equip a profound scholar with H. L. Mencken's instinct for running down charlatans and chuckleheads, and you get this book It will amuse and embarrass those of us ever befuddled by the rogues in her gallery."--Garry Wills, author of Lincoln at Gettysburg
"A series of engaging and wonderfully perceptive essays on how individuals caught in time made sense of life and death. Jill Lepore is one of America's most accomplished and imaginative historians."--Linda Colley, author of The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh
"With wit and erudition, Lepore demonstrates that nothing is more mutable and time-bound than our most cherished notions about the supposedly eternal verities of life and death."---Susan Jacoby, author of The Age of American Unreason
Available at: