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An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer
Bestselling author of Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich explores how we are killing ourselves to live longer, not better.
A razor-sharp polemic which offers an entirely new understanding of our bodies, ourselves, and our place in the universe, Natural Causes describes how we over-prepare and worry way too much about what is inevitable. One by one, Ehrenreich topples the shibboleths that guide our attempts to live a long, healthy life - from the importance of preventive medical screenings to the concepts of wellness and mindfulness, from dietary fads to fitness culture.
But Natural Causes goes deeper - into the fundamental unreliability of our bodies and even our "mind-bodies," to use the fashionable term. Starting with the mysterious and seldom-acknowledged tendency of our own immune cells to promote deadly cancers, Ehrenreich looks into the cellular basis of aging, and shows how little control we actually have over it. We tend to believe we have agency over our bodies, our minds, and even over the manner of our deaths. But the latest science shows that the microscopic subunits of our bodies make their own "decisions," and not always in our favor.
We may buy expensive anti-aging products or cosmetic surgery, get preventive screenings and eat more kale, or throw ourselves into meditation and spirituality. But all these things offer only the illusion of control. How to live well, even joyously, while accepting our mortality - that is the vitally important philosophical challenge of this book.
Drawing on varied sources, from personal experience and sociological trends to pop culture and current scientific literature, Natural Causes examines the ways in which we obsess over death, our bodies, and our health. Both funny and caustic, Ehrenreich then tackles the seemingly unsolvable problem of how we might better prepare ourselves for the end - while still reveling in the lives that remain to us.
"A powerful text that floods the mind with illumination - and with agonizing questions." - Kirkus
"Claiming to be 'old enough to die,' feminist scholar Ehrenreich (Living with a Wild God) takes on the task of investigating America's peculiar approach to aging, health, and wellness...Ehrenreich's sharp intelligence and graceful prose make this book largely pleasurable reading." - Publishers Weekly
"A welcome reminder to relax in the face of our own mortality, this is fast-paced, hard-nosed discourse. Sure to appeal to dissidents from the cult of wellness." - Library Journal
"[Ehrenreich] offers a healthy dose of reformist philosophy combined with her trademark investigative journalism. In assessing our quest for a longer, healthier life, Ehrenreich provides a contemplative vision of an active, engaged health care that goes far beyond the physical restraints of the body and into the realm of metaphysical possibilities." - Booklist
"An incisive, clear-eyed polemic, Natural Causes relaxes into the realization that the grim reaper is considerably less grim than a life spent in terror of a fate that awaits us all." - Matthew Desmond, Pulitzer Prize-winning and New York Times bestselling author of Evicted
"...[A] provocative, informative, hilarious, and deeply moving book. A must read." - Arlie Hochschild, New York Times bestselling author of Strangers in their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right
"'Give me a lever and a place to stand and I will move the earth,' promised Archimedes. In Natural Causes, Barbara Ehrenreich has achieved an Archimedean feat. Her lever is made of erudition, acuity and irreverence; her place to stand is the perspective of cultural criticism; and she has turned the current understanding of body and self upon its head. To read this book is a relief: at last, what needed to be said!" - Jessica Riskin, author of The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick
"Barbara Ehrenreich is a singular voice of sanity amid our national obsession with wellness and longevity. She is deeply well-informed about contemporary medical practices and their shortcomings, but she wears her learning lightly. Natural Causes is a delightful as well as an enlightening read. No one who cares about living (or dying) well can afford to miss it." - Jackson Lears, PhD, Editor in Chief of the Raritan Quarterly Review
This information about Natural Causes was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Barbara Ehrenreich was the author of more than 20 books, including the New York Times bestseller Nickel and Dimed. She was a frequent contributor to the New York Times, Harpers, and the Progressive, as well as a contributing writer to Time magazine.
She died in September 2022 aged 81. Her daughter said the cause was a stroke. She continued to write into her eighties leaving an unfinished work about the evolution of narcissism.
According to her New York Times obituary, Ms. Ehrenreich said she believed that her job as a journalist was to shed light on the unnecessary pain in the world: "The idea is not that we will win in our own lifetimes and that's the measure of us...but that we will die trying."
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