I have an aversion toward writing book reviews. I think it comes from middle school, when we were taught how to write them according to a template and always had to fulfill certain requirements that the teacher would check off. Accordingly I don't tend to write book reviews of my own free will, but I've read a couple of pretty good books lately that I feel obligated to share. In order to do this, I need to preface anything I write with the disclaimer that these are not book reviews. They're not meant to follow any middle school guidelines and they're not meant to be good reads in themselves, like the ones in the NYT Review of Books.
Phew. Now that I have that out of the way, maybe I can actually do this.
Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650-1750Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
New York: Vintage Books, 1980
ISBN 978-0394519401
Good Wives by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich was my most recent read and I really enjoyed it. (There. I've already flouted my middle school indoctrination, because we were never allowed to say "I enjoyed it" or "This was a good book." It was just too easy, I guess.) It discusses the role - or rather, varied and unexpected roles - of women during the 17th- and 18th-century New England. It's a good companion to the Pulitzer-winning
A Midwife's Tale, also by Ulrich (not that the publishers would ever let you forget that), which investigated many of the same questions through the perspective of one woman's life and work.
Rather than focusing on one woman, however, Ulrich fills out her picture of colonial New England life with a complex composed of many different women of different backgrounds. This is not only interesting but necessary, due to the fact that for most women of this time only scraps of evidence remain to attest to the people they were. Ulrich stitches those scraps together to create a likeness of the colonial New England woman as she appeared in both ideal and flesh-and-blood form.
What struck me most while reading
Good Wives, and in fact while reading
A Midwife's Tale as well, is just how frequently I was surprised by the things I learned. It seems that New England women's history is remarkable not simply because it reveals what we didn't know, but because it reveals that what we thought we knew is wrong. Most people think they have at least a general idea of how colonial women behaved and thought; I know I did. The chasm between our perceptions and what is suggested by Ulrich's research is staggering. Such a chasm doesn't exist for the history of colonial men during this period. The disjointed and misleading perception of colonial women we have today is a direct result of the disjointed and misleading evidence of their lives that now exists. Ulrich describes how such evidence (and lack thereof) has served both to hide and distort our view of these women. At the same time, she makes an effective attempt to resurrect what she can from the scattered and scant remains.
Digging Up the Dead: A History of Notable American ReburialsMichael Kammen
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010
ISBN 978-0226423296
This is a good book that I felt could have been about three times longer. Its strength lies in Michael Kammen's lively narration of the sad, bizarre, and sometimes downright hilarious journeys that certain corpses have taken throughout American history before reaching their final resting places. Kammen also provides an analysis of the anecdotes he describes, attempting to piece them together in such a way that the final picture reflects back on the culture and society from which they sprung. My problem is not with the analysis itself, but with the amount of it. I suppose I wanted a more thorough investigation of
all the different currents of American history that the reburial stories tap into: the transformation of the meaning and position of death over time; the effects of changing patterns of mortality on the perception of death over time; the European (and non-European?) roots of American mortuary practices and their symbolic and practical implications, etc.
I suppose what I really wanted was a different book altogether. For what it sets out to accomplish,
Digging Up the Dead is successful, but it also made many hints at the additional directions that it could have taken. Kammen writes, for instance, that before the 19th century a large portion of Americans were not buried with tombstones. Why? Does this have to do with changing views on individuality, on personal immortality? I am interested by the process by which something that is considered non-essential becomes something that almost all people think they need.
Interestingly enough, a lot of the questions I found myself asking throughout this book are answered in the Penn & Teller: Bullshit! episode "Death, Inc.," which you can watch
here. Penn and Teller: out-scholaring Cornell scholars since 1975.
