How do our ideas about dying influence the way we live? Life has often been envisioned as a journey, the river of time carrying us inexorably toward the unknown country--and in our day we increasingly turn to myth and magic, ritual and virtual reality, cloning and cryostasis in the hope of eluding the reality of the inevitable end. In this book a preeminent and eminently wise writer on death and dying proposes a new way of understanding our last transition. A fresh exploration of the final passage through life and perhaps through death, his work deftly interweaves historical and contemporary experiences and reflections to demonstrate that we are always on our way. Drawing on a remarkable range of observations--from psychology, anthropology, religion, biology, and personal experience--Robert Kastenbaum re-envisions life's forward-looking progress, from early-childhood bedtime rituals to the many small rehearsals we stage for our final separation. Along the way he illuminates such moments and ideas as becoming a "corpsed person," going down to earth or up in flames, respecting or abusing (and eating) the dead, coping with "too many dead," conceiving and achieving a "good death," undertaking the journey of the dead, and learning to live through the scrimmage of daily life fully knowing that Eternity does not really come in a designer flask. Profound, insightful, often moving, this look at death as many cultures await it or approach it enriches our understanding of life as a never-ending passage.

This is the first single-volume introduction to the national history of crime and punishment. From the medieval period to the present day, this survey work synthesizes the wealth of case-study and local-level material and standardizes the debates and issues for the student reader.

The local prisons of the latter half of the 19th century refined systems of punishment so harsh that one judge considered the maximum sentence of two years local imprisonment to be the most severe punishment known to English law: "next only to death." The punishment inflicted on prisoners was often carried beyond the limits of health and sanity. English Local Prisonsexamines how private perceptions and concerns became public policy. It also traces the move in English government from the rural and aristocratic to the urban and more democratic. The book follows the rise of the powerful elite of the higher civil service, describes some of the forces that attempted to oppose it, and provides a window throughwhich to view the process of state formation. Next only to the workhouse and the school, local prisons were probably the most widely experienced civil institution of the times, yet by a curious oversight this is the first scholarly study of the subject. The book isbased on exhaustive archive research, and offers a new and original account of a most important episode in English social, lega and administrative history.

Exhaustively researched and in chronological order, this collection of trivia related to crime includes facts on the first train robbery, the last person in England to be imprisoned for denying the existence of God, and the only person to be hanged wearing a policeman’s uniform.