Ernest Becker was already dying when “The Denial of Death” was published 50 years ago this past fall. “This is a test of everything I’ve written about death,” he told a visitor to his Vancouver hospital room. Throughout his career as a cultural anthropologist, Becker had charted the undiscovered country that awaits us all. Now only 49 but losing a battle to colon cancer, he was being dispatched there himself. By the time his book was awarded a Pulitzer Prize the following spring, Becker was gone.
These grim details may seem like the makings of a downer, to put it mildly, and another downer is the last thing anyone needs right now. But there is no gloom in “Denial,” no self-pity, not even the maudlin wisdom today’s illness memoirs have primed us to expect. A rare mind is at work, and you get to hang out in the workshop. Writing against the hardest stop of all, Becker managed to produce “a kind of cosmic pep talk,” as the literary critic Anatole Broyard put it in The New York Times.
In her fascinating new book, “The Age of Deer,” Erika Howsare considers the role deer have played in the creation of an American mythology — and how that mythology nearly led to the animal’s complete disappearance from American land. By 1900, deer had been harvested to near-extinction for their hides and their meat. States including Kansas, Vermont and Ohio had no deer at all. Fewer than 100,000 remained. Today, it’s estimated that 30 million of them live among us — enough to threaten native environments such as Catalina Island, where a controversial eradication plan is under debate.
Fluctuations in American deer populations reflect a deeper human story. “What we can say with certainty is this: for thousands of years, people and deer existed together,” Howsare writes. “And after Europeans arrived, deer nearly went extinct. Surely there was a difference not just of action, but of mind. Those deer population graphs track numbers of animals, but they also map human thought.”
Imagine a story of sex, drugs and secrets inside Downing Street. A story about a political wife accused of meddling, and a resignation honours list mired in scandal. And no, it’s not the one you’re thinking of. This is the irresistible tale of Marcia Williams, political secretary and “office wife” to the Labour prime minister Harold Wilson, and if it were the plot of a thriller it would seem too wild to be true.