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.

Hunting Dogs with Dead Hare, by Gustave Courbet. 1857.

Essay

Mournful Creatures

By Virginia Morell

Humans may be the only animals who understand our mortality, but when it comes to grieving, we are not so unique.

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.