Exploring Mortality
When 36-year-old physician Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer, he knew he had little time left to live. The memoir of his final months spent coming to terms with the reality, When Breath Becomes Air, questions what it means to live in the face of death. Kalanithi reflects on the doctor-patient relationship during this difficult time--a theme that Atul Gawande also explores in Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End. Gawande, also a physician, takes a hard look at the role of the medical industry in aging and death, examining the ways end-of-life care have worked and not worked as medical technologies have advanced.
Where Kalanithi and Gawande look at life immediately preceding death, others focus on what comes after. Mary Roach touches on this in two of her books: Stiff, which explores the science of what happens to cadavers used in scientific research, and Spook, which provides a surprisingly scientific exploration of the afterlife. In her memoir Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, Caitlin Doughty weaves together tales of her work at a crematory with research into death rituals and mythologies across history, encouraging readers to reconsider their attitudes towards death. Tom Jokinen details the modern funeral industry in his memoir, Curtains: Adventures of an Undertaker-in-Training, while Judy Melinick shares what a career as a medical examiner has taught her about how we live and how we die in Working Stiff.
Death may be an uncomfortable subject for many, but the wealth of literature on the subject speaks to our boundless fascination with it as an inevitable part of every life. After all, as the very wise (albeit fictional) Albus Dumbledore once said, "to the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure." --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm
Madonna began working on the project in 2010, and what he thought would be a two-year project turned into a six-year project. He first visited southeast Asia in 1999, and after falling in love with the region, "vowed to myself I would always go back and make something there." When Madonna was in the process of publishing his first All Over Coffee collection, he initially had a hard time of it, with publishers saying they loved his work but wouldn't publish the book because they thought it was regional and would sell only in the Bay Area. While most of the art in All Over Coffee did feature San Francisco, Madonna found that label frustrating, because he was receiving letters from and shipping art to readers all over the world. City Lights, which Madonna said understood that his work would have wider appeal, eventually published All Over Coffee and its follow-up, Everything Is Its Own Reward, but even though the latter collection featured drawings of more than a dozen cities, it was still considered by many to be a "San Francisco book."
Susan Vreeland, whose novels explore art, artists and artistic inspiration, died on August 31 at age 71. She earned widespread acclaim for her second novel, Girl in Hyacinth Blue (1999), which follows a fictional Vermeer painting through centuries of ownership back to its conception. Vreeland uses eight short stories to track the Vermeer's owners, beginning with a remorseful professor whose Nazi father looted the work while rounding up Jews in Amsterdam. The next story tracks that doomed Dutch family, then moves further back in time to a farmer's wife, a Bohemian student and on to the pictured girl herself, with each person altering the painting's fate and being touched by its beauty.
