Awards

• Short-listed for Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction 2013

Overview

Renowned Harvard scholar and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore has written a strikingly original, ingeniously conceived, and beautifully crafted history of American ideas about life and death from before the cradle to beyond the grave.   How does life begin? What does it mean? What happens when we die? “All anyone can do is ask,” Lepore writes. “That’s why any history of ideas about life and death has to be, like this book, a history of curiosity.” Lepore starts that history with the story of a seventeenth-century Englishman who had the idea that all life begins with an egg, and ends it with an American who, in the 1970s, began freezing the dead. In between, life got longer, the stages of life multiplied, and matters of life and death moved from the library to the laboratory, from the humanities to the sciences. Lately, debates about life and death have determined the course of American politics. Each of these debates has a history. Investigating the surprising origins of the stuff of everyday life—from board games to breast pumps—Lepore argues that the age of discovery, Darwin, and the Space Age turned ideas about life on earth topsy-turvy. “New worlds were found,” she writes, and “old paradises were lost.” As much a meditation on the present as an excavation of the past, The Mansion of Happiness is delightful, learned, and altogether beguiling.

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9780307476456

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Reviews

With her characteristically sharp-edged humor and luminous storytelling, Lepore regales us with stories that follow the stages of life...her inspired commentary on our shared social history offers a fresh approach to our changing views of life and death. - Publishers Weekly <br> A trenchant and fascinating intellectual history of life and death...elegant. -Dani Shapiro, The New York Times Book Review <br> A stunning meditation on three questions that have dominated serious reflection about human nature and cultures for centuries: How does life begin? What does it mean? What happens when we die?...Lepore's refreshing and often humorous insights breathe fresh air into these everlasting matters. -Bookpage <br> A breezy, informative, wide-ranging book...singular, always stimulating. - The American Scholar <br> Lepore's prose is thoroughly engaging and witty...covers enough of mankind's earnest curiosity about life and death to both entertain and provoke thought. - Booklist <br> Lepore chooses quirky, though always revealing, lenses through which is examine the changing definitions of conception, infancy, childhood, puberty, marriage, middle age, parenthood, old age, death, and immortality...Through sheer force of charisma, Lepore keeps her readers on track: this book, with all its detours and winding turns, is a journey worth taking. - Library Journal <br> [Lepore] manages to spin a larger narrative that both fascinates and informs, showing that our taken-for-granted ideas about every stage of life are culturally specific, very much a product of our times. -Rachel Newcomb, The Washington Post <br> <br> Engaging...Lepore writes about our striving to understand our existence. The Mansion of Happiness is an important addition to the effort. - San Francisco Chronicle <br> Lepore has a brilliant way of selecting just the right historical detail to illuminate a larger point...The most valuable lesson here is that of impermanenc

With her characteristically sharp-edged humor and luminous storytelling, Lepore regales us with stories that follow the stages of life. . . her inspired commentary on our shared social history offers a fresh approach to our changing views of life and death. -- Publishers Weekly <br> A trenchant and fascinating intellectual history of life and death . . . elegant. --Dani Shapiro, The New York Times Book Review <br> A stunning meditation on three questions that have dominated serious reflection about human nature and cultures for centuries: How does life begin? What does it mean? What happens when we die? . . . Lepore's refreshing and often humorous insights breathe fresh air into these everlasting matters. --Bookpage <br> A breezy, informative, wide-ranging book . . . singular, always stimulating. -- The American Scholar <br> Lepore's prose is thoroughly engaging and witty . . . covers enough of mankind's earnest curiosity about life and death to both entertain and provoke thought. -- Booklist <br> Lepore chooses quirky, though always revealing, lenses through which is examine the changing definitions of conception, infancy, childhood, puberty, marriage, middle age, parenthood, old age, death, and immortality. . . . Through sheer force of charisma, Lepore keeps her readers on track: this book, with all its detours and winding turns, is a journey worth taking. -- Library Journal <br> [Lepore] manages to spin a larger narrative that both fascinates and informs, showing that our taken-for-granted ideas about every stage of life are culturally specific, very much a product of our times. --Rachel Newcomb, The Washington Post <br> <br> Engaging. . . . Lepore writes about our striving to understand our existence. The Mansion of Happiness is an important addition to the effort. -- San Francisco Chronicle <br> Lepore has a brilliant way of selecting just the right historical detail to illuminate a larger point. . . . The most v

Author Information

Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her books include The Story of America; The Whites of Their Eyes; New York Burning, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and The Name of War, winner of the Bancroft Prize. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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