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6 books match the query 'Deaths'

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In the Long Run We're All Dead

The Lives and Deaths of Great Economists

Björn Frank

Haus Publishing, 2023

A fascinating and entertaining account of the lives of the most important economists of the past.

Until the late nineteenth century, economics couldn’t be studied at the university level; the field was the domain of well-educated figures whose radical curiosity drew them to a discipline that was little understood and often ridiculed. In the Long Run We’re All Dead tells the story of one of those figures in each of its thirteen chapters. Each of these extraordinary lives is worthy of fiction, and the manner of their deaths, oddly, often illuminates their work. Björn Frank shows us how these economists developed the theories for which they became famous and explains those ideas—utilitarianism, social costs, the endowment effect, and others—with reference to the lives of their creators in an engaging, irreverent, even comic style. Frank also takes daring leaps into speculation, considering how the principles of these long-gone economists might be applied to problems of today and of the future.

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Map Men

Transnational Lives and Deaths of Geographers in the Making of East Central Europe

Steven Seegel

University of Chicago Press, 2018

More than just colorful clickbait or pragmatic city grids, maps are often deeply emotional tales: of political projects gone wrong, budding relationships that failed, and countries that vanished. In Map Men, Steven Seegel takes us through some of these historical dramas with a detailed look at the maps that made and unmade the world of East Central Europe through a long continuum of world war and revolution. As a collective biography of five prominent geographers between 1870 and 1950—Albrecht Penck, Eugeniusz Romer, Stepan Rudnyts’kyi, Isaiah Bowman, and Count Pál Teleki—Map Men reexamines the deep emotions, textures of friendship, and multigenerational sagas behind these influential maps.

Taking us deep into cartographical archives, Seegel re-creates the public and private worlds of these five mapmakers, who interacted with and influenced one another even as they played key roles in defining and redefining borders, territories, nations—and, ultimately, the interconnection of the world through two world wars. Throughout, he examines the transnational nature of these processes and addresses weighty questions about the causes and consequences of the world wars, the rise of Nazism and Stalinism, and the reasons East Central Europe became the fault line of these world-changing developments.

At a time when East Central Europe has surged back into geopolitical consciousness, Map Men offers a timely and important look at the historical origins of how the region was defined—and the key people who helped define it.

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Paralyzing Summer

The True Story of the Ann Arbor V.A. Hospital Poisonings and Deaths

Zibby Oneal and S. Martin Lindenauer

University of Michigan Press, 2016

In the summer of 1975, an alarming number of patients at the Ann Arbor Veterans Administration Hospital began experiencing mysterious respiratory failures that left ten dead and over thirty more clinging to life. Doctors struggled to determine the cause of the attacks, and further analysis revealed each of the victims’ intravenous drip bags had been contaminated with a powerful muscle relaxant named Pavulon—a drug traditionally used in hospitals when inserting patient breathing tubes in preparation for surgery. The discovery of Pavulon was particularly disturbing because hospital safeguards made it unlikely the chemical had been introduced to patients’ drip bags by mistake. This suggested deliberate poisoning, but with no apparent connection between the victims, the motive behind the crime was unclear. The tangled investigation that followed gripped the nation’s attention, particularly after the FBI narrowed its focus to two improbable suspects: a pair of well-liked nurses from the hospital’s intensive care unit. Both were of Filipino decent, and the national media speculated racism was a major factor in the scrutiny placed on the nurses. Drawing extensively from court documents, news coverage from the time, and interviews with participants, Zibby Oneal and S. Martin Lindenauer’s Paralyzing Summer presents a gripping account of the baffling case, following the incredible twists and turns that unfolded over a two and a half year period starting July 1975.

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The Deaths of Henri Regnault

Marc Gotlieb

University of Chicago Press, 2016

This is the first book in English on Henri Regnault (1843–71), a forgotten star of the European fin-de-siècle. A brilliant maverick who once seemed to hold the future of French painting in his hands, Regnault enjoyed a meteoric rise that was cut short when he died at the age of twenty-seven in the Franco-Prussian War. The story of his glamorous career and patriotic death colored French commemorative culture for nearly forty years—until his memory was swept away by the vast losses of World War I. In The Deaths of Henri Regnault, Marc Gotlieb reintroduces this important artist while offering a new perspective on the ultimate decline of nineteenth-century salon painting.

Gotlieb traces Regnault’s trajectory after he won the prestigious Grand Prix de Rome, a fellowship that provided four years of study in Italy. Arriving in Rome, however, Regnault suffered a profound crisis of originality that led him to flee the city in favor of Spain and Morocco. But the crisis also proved productive: from Rome, Madrid, Tangier, and Paris, Regnault enthralled audiences with a bold suite of strange, seductive, and violent Orientalist paintings inspired by his exotic journey—images that, Gotlieb argues, arose precisely from the crisis that had overtaken Regnault and that in key respects was shared by his more avant-garde counterparts.

Both an in-depth look at Regnault’s violent art and a vibrant essay on historical memory, The Deaths of Henri Regnault lays bare a creative legend who helped shape the collective experience of a generation.

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The Deaths of the Author

Reading and Writing in Time

Jane Gallop

Duke University Press, 2011

For thirty years the "death of the author" has been a familiar poststructuralist slogan in literary theory, widely understood and much debated as a dismissal of the author, a declaration of the writer's irrelevance to the readers experience. In this concise book, Jane Gallop revitalizes this hackneyed concept by considering not only the abstract theoretical death of the author but also the writer's literal death, as well as other authorial "deaths" such as obsolescence. Through bravura close readings of the influential literary theorists Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, she shows that the death of the author is best understood as a relation to temporality, not only for the reader but especially for the writer. Gallop does not just approach the death of the author from the reader's perspective; she also reflects at length on how impending death haunts the writer. By connecting an author's theoretical, literal, and metaphoric deaths, she enables us to take a fuller measure of the moving and unsettling effects of the deaths of the author on readers and writers, and on reading and writing.

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The Lives and Deaths of Women in Ancient Pompeii

Brenda Longfellow

University of Texas Press, 2025

A study of women’s lives in the public sphere of the ancient city of Pompeii.

Pompeii’s well-preserved remains provide a unique opportunity for the close study of ancient lives. Drawing on statues, inscriptions, graffiti, wall paintings, and the architecture of tombs, sanctuaries, houses, and public spaces, The Lives and Deaths of Women in Ancient Pompeii examines the public lives of women in Pompeii. Art historian Brenda Longfellow explores how historical women of all social backgrounds acted in public and exerted agency on behalf of themselves and others, ultimately finding that female initiatives in Pompeii were not only accepted but desired by the community to a greater extent than has previously been recognized.

Longfellow centers her study on a few key women—including the city’s most notable female patron, Eumachia—and uses them to examine female roles in postmortem commemorations, civic patronage and benefactions, commerce, the priesthood, and the home. By following these individuals, Longfellow examines women’s lives in Pompeii in both abstract and concrete ways, allowing readers to better understand their importance to the city and society. The result is a groundbreaking book that foregrounds the agency of women in everyday Pompeii.

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