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The book draws on a vast range of sources--from mortuary archaeology, medical tracts, letters, songs, poems, and novels to painting and landscapes in order to recover the work that the dead do for the living: making human communities that connect the past and the future. Laqueur shows how the churchyard became the dominant resting place of the dead during the Middle Ages and why the cemetery largely supplanted it during the modern period. He traces how and why since the nineteenth century we have come to gather the names of the dead on great lists and memorials and why being buried without a name has become so disturbing. And finally, he tells how modern cremation, begun as a fantasy of stripping death of its history, ultimately failed--and how even the ashes of the victims of the Holocaust have been preserved in culture.  A fascinating chronicle of how we shape the dead and are in turn shaped by them, this is a landmark work of cultural history.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49521309679889,"sku":"GOR007626345","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50097705648401,"sku":"CIN0691157782G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51438492811537,"sku":"CIN0691157782VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0691157782.jpg?v=1750912338"},{"product_id":"work-of-the-dead-book-thomas-w-laqueur-9780691180939","title":"The Work of the Dead","description":"The meaning of our concern for mortal remains-from antiquity through the twentieth centuryThe Greek philosopher Diogenes said that when he died his body should be tossed over the city walls for beasts to scavenge. 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Masturbation may be the last taboo. But this is not a holdover from a more benighted age. The ancient world cared little about the subject; it was a backwater of Jewish and Christian teaching about sexuality. In fact, solitary sex as a serious moral issue can be dated with a precision rare in cultural history; Laqueur identifies it with the publication of the anonymous tract \u003ci\u003eOnania\u003c\/i\u003e in about 1722. Masturbation is a creation of the Enlightenment, of some of its most important figures, and of the most profound changes it unleashed. It is modern. It worried at first not conservatives, but progressives. It was the first truly democratic sexuality that could be of ethical interest for women as much as for men, for boys and girls as much as for their elders.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e The book's range is vast. It begins with the prehistory of solitary sex in the Bible and ends with third-wave feminism, conceptual artists, and the Web. It explains how and why this humble and once obscure means of sexual gratification became the evil twin--or the perfect instance--of the great virtues of modern humanity and commercial society: individual moral autonomy and privacy, creativity and the imagination, abundance and desire.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49883551990033,"sku":"CIN1890951331VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50765109100817,"sku":"CIN1890951331G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51056194421009,"sku":"NIN9781890951337","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51784076230929,"sku":"GOR007149627","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":51879129973009,"sku":"NGR9781890951337","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53077459271953,"sku":"GOR012395780","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1890951331.jpg?v=1750803622"},{"product_id":"solitary-sex-book-thomas-w-laqueur-9781890951320","title":"Solitary Sex","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eA historical account of masturbation as a moral issue and cultural taboo.\u003c\/b\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eAt a time when almost any victimless sexual practice has its public advocates and almost every sexual act is fit for the front page, the easiest, least harmful, and most universal one is embarrassing, discomforting, and genuinely radical when openly acknowledged. 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A delight for dog-loving art connoisseurs, and vice versa.\" --\u003ci\u003eKirkus\u003c\/i\u003e (starred review)\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e From award-winning cultural historian, an enlightening and unique meditation on the presence of dogs in art, from the Paleolithic era to the present, and what our intertwined human-canine relationship reveals about human nature\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Long before the phrase man's best friend became common parlance, dogs were already standing beside us in art as in life. In \u003ci\u003eThe Dog's Gaze\u003c\/i\u003e, the historian Thomas W. Laqueur invites us to explore why they feature more than any other animal in the ways in which we picture ourselves and our stories.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Dogs have been ubiquitous in the worldmaking of visual artists as far back as the Paleolithic age. 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