BODIES IN MOTION & AT REST CL: On Metaphor and Mortality - Tapa dura

Thomas Lynch, called "a cross between Garrison Keillor and William Butler Yeats" (New York Times), reminds us not only of how we die but also of how we live. "The facts of life and death remain the same. We live and die, we love and grieve, we breed and disappear. And between these existential gravities, we search for meaning, save our memories, leave a record for those who will remember us." So writes Thomas Lynch, poet and funeral director, and author of the highly praised The Undertaking, winner of an American Book Award and finalist for the National Book Award, as he continues to examine the relations between the "literary and mortuary arts." The essays assembled here explore the human condition at the intersection of millennia, beleaguered by choices and changes, encumbered by merger and acquisition, numbed by maths and technologies, in search of the meaning of life and time, our lives and times. Lynch tenders life and times--sextons, muckrakers, clergy, caskets, condoms, loved poems, a hated cat, the mall, Main Street. In an age that seeks to define human experience in retail, high-tech, or pop-psyche terms, these essays speak to the existentials: between being human and ceasing to be, between birth and death, we are bodies in motion and at rest.

Why Socialism has failed to play a significant role in the United States -- the most developed capitalist industrial society and hence, ostensibly, fertile ground for socialism -- has been a critical question of American history and political development. Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks "survey with subtlety and shrewd judgment the various explanations" (Wall Street Journal) for this phenomenon of American political exceptionalism.

"Clearly written, intelligent, filled with new information" (Times Literary Supplement), this "splendidly convincing" (Michael Kazin, Georgetown University) work eschews conventional arguments about socialism's demise to present a fuller understanding of how multiple factors -- political structure, American values, immigration, and the split between the Socialist party and mainstream unions -- combined to seal socialism's fate.