Renowned Harvard scholar and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore has composed 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.
About Jill Lepore
Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Editorial Review
Brilliantly written and engaging throughout, the latest from New Yorkerstaff writer Lepore (American History/Harvard Univ.; The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle Over American History, 2011, etc.) is about how American society reacts to change. The author starts with the perfect metaphor: In 1860, a young entrepreneur named Milton Bradley created a popular board game called Life. The game had long existed in earlier versions, but Bradley gave it a capitalist spin, changing it from a game of good versus evil to one that “rewards only those virtues that lead to Wealth and Success, like Industry and Perseverance.” From there, Lepore tackles conception and how the famous pictures of a fetus in Life in the mid ’60s fostered the relatively modern idea of “being unborn as a stage of human life, a stage that was never on any board game.” The author shows how E.B. White’s surprisingly controversial novel Stuart Little created a small revolution in a country that has always worshipped childhood; she sees it as “an indictment of both the childishness of children’s literature and the juvenilization of American culture.” Lepore’s topics are broad, and they lead her into many interesting byways—e.g., how eugenics was once considered a perfectly progressive idea and how contraception once seemed to threaten society in ways even Rick Santorum has not imagined. She also considers the legacy of Karen Ann Quinlan, the brain-dead young woman whose case helped foment arguments for both the right to die and the right to life, and discusses her visit to the creepy laboratory of cryogenics founder Robert C.W. Ettinger. – Kirkus Reviews
“The Mansion of Happiness: A History of Life and Death” by Jill Lepore
The Washington Post Book Review – July 7, 2012 (Excerpt)
In 1860, the founding father of American board games, Milton Bradley, came up with his first invention: the Checkered Game of Life. Although board games in which players moved through various life stages were played in Southeast Asia more than 1,000 years ago, Bradley’s game was distinctively American.
Avoiding vice and virtue, players pursued honesty, bravery and success while trying to avoid Suicide. One hundred years later, Bradley’s game of Life was transformed into “a lesson in consumer conformity, a two-dimensional Levittown, complete with paychecks and retirement homes and medical bills.” In “The Mansion of Happiness,” Harvard historian Jill Lepore uses these life-themed board games as her opening gambit in a history of ideas that traces the ways our conceptualizations of life and death have been accompanied by specific changes in science, technology, politics and industry.
With the advent of modernity and urbanization, the cyclical rhythms of the agricultural world increasingly fell away, to be replaced by the idea of life as a relentless drive toward progress, beginning with infancy. “The Mansion of Happiness” traces how we came to perceive life as a series of discrete stages, some of which, such as adolescence, did not exist as a concept before the Industrial Revolution. (Although adolescence is an inescapable biological fact, Lepore notes that it was in a newly urbanized America that this stage of life came to acquire the characteristics we associate with it today, such as rebellion and the potential for sexual activity outside marriage.) [Read the full article...]
Streams of Consciousness - ‘The Mansion of Happiness,’ by Jill Lepore
The New York Times Book Review – August 10, 2012 (Excerpt)
Around 1806, Britain’s most popular board game was introduced to the United States. Called the Mansion of Happiness, it — like the New Game of Human Life, a somewhat less thrilling predecessor — was based on the idea that life is a voyage in which travelers are buffeted between vice and virtue. In 1843 an American edition was issued. It quickly caught on, selling 4,000 copies in 10 months. The “mansion” in question was a heavenly one, the final destination for the pious. (“Be virtuous then and forward press, / To gain the seat of happiness,” the rules read.)
By the second half of the 19th century, a young entrepreneur named Milton Bradley had reinvented the game as the Checkered Game of Life, in which piety took a back seat to prosperity, perseverance led to success, and truth had no value. As Jill Lepore writes in “The Mansion of Happiness,” a trenchant and fascinating intellectual history of life and death, the new game wasn’t “a race to heaven,” but “a series of calculations about the best route to collect the most points, fastest. Accumulate or fail.” In other words, he who ends up with the most toys, wins.
Lepore uses the Game of Life as a point from which to embark into serious engagement with a set of perennially unanswerable questions: “How does life begin? What does it mean? What happens when you’re dead?” Tracing the history of ideas related to these questions, which lie at the heart of every religion and most world conflict, and animate centuries’ worth of scientific research, she casts a sympathetic gaze on humanity and its often cockamamie ideas. “Matters of life and death have to do with faith and knowledge and hope and despair,” she writes. Though these matters have been politicized and seem, if anything, to be growing all the more so, Lepore’s interests here are not so much political as historical, psychological and philosophical. [Read the full article...]
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