The Dead Toreador, by Édouard Manet, c. 1864. National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

The Dead Toreador, by Édouard Manet, c. 1864. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

Death

Volume VI, Number 4 | fall 2013

Purchase

"The Antiquary's Last Will and Testament" from The English Dance of Death, by Thomas Rowlandson, 1814.

Preamble

Memento Mori

By Lewis H. Lapham

Learning how to die, as Michel de Montaigne once rightly said, is the unlearning of how to be a slave.

More

Fond Farewells

By Bess Lovejoy

Jessica Mitford’s An American Way of Death took down an industry few people knew about, but that everyone would one day need.

More

Map

Departures

A million ways to die.

View

Miscellany

In May 1953, the TV show This is Your Life honored Hanna Bloch Kohner, a Holocaust survivor, and surprised her with appearances from her closest friend in Auschwitz and a soldier who liberated the camp. It was the first national television show to tell the story of a Holocaust survivor. On the program in May 1955, Kiyoshi Tanimoto, a survivor of Hiroshima, came face-to-face with Captain Robert Lewis, copilot of the Enola Gay.

1926 | New York City

Receiving the Summons

She is not dead, she’s resting in the bosom of Jesus.More

1390 | Japan

Walking in Circles

The dangers of thinking too much.More

8 | Tomis

Don’t Look Back

Ovid on resurrection. More

Charts & Graphs

Final Resting Places

A (death) map to the stars.

View

Color photograph of American writer Mary Roach leaning on door.

Color portrait of Greek poet Anacreon.

Black and white photograph of American poet and novelist Sylvia Plath.

Color photograph of Russian multimillionaire Dmitry Itskov.

Sculpture bust of Greek historian Herodotus.

Black and white of Welsh poet and writer Dylan Thomas.

I do not amuse myself by thinking of dead people.

—Napoleon Bonaparte, 1807

Painted portrait of Scottish philosopher David Hume.

Color photograph of American physician Jack Kevorkian.

David Hume & Jack Kevorkian

Purchase

Lapham’sDaily

Roundtable

Lapham’s Quarterly Is on Hiatus

By Lapham’s Quarterly

But the American Agora Foundation is already planning for the future. More

The Colosseum, attributed to Robert Eaton, c. 1855.

DÉjÀ Vu

Monumental Mistakes

2023:

Fitness instructor carves his girlfriend’s name into the Colosseum.

c. 1850:

Thompson of Sunderland makes his mark on Pompey’s pillar.

More

Terracotta funerary plaque, Greek, Attic, c. 520 BC.

The World in Time

Robert D. Kaplan

Lewis H. Lapham speaks with the author of The Tragic Mind: Fear, Fate, and the Burden of Power. More

play
pause

00:00

00:00