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This collection of essays by psychiatrists, psychologists, sociologists, an anthropologist, a historian, and a gerontologist among others, is divided into four sections: a theoretical discussion of death; attitudes and responses toward death; grief and mourning; and a part entitled, Ceremony, the Self and Society. The editor, a professor of sociology at California State College, has written an introduction to each section.
The common denominator is a pragmatic goal; through understanding the problems involved, to show individuals how to preserve rather than to lose their identities. The thesis is that the way people live and the way they die are usually manifestations of a lack of commitment to the realities of existence, in which living and death are both immutable parts of a cycle.
Psychological Effects of the Atomic Bomb in Hiroshima: The Theme of Death, by Robert Jay Lifton, is a stimulating study of the impact of the tragic bombings on the populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Among the survivors there was intense psychic