A Very Easy Death (Pantheon Modern Writers Series)

Description

A poignant account of her mother's death from cancer.

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Customer Reviews

the Realm of Existentialism
Think: dealing with Death and Dying of loved one

"For indeed, comparatively speaking, her death was an easy one. "Don't leave me in the power of the brutes.""

It all boils down to have an operation and perhaps live a bit longer or euthanatize and be done with it. The subject is death and dying is a main theme of Existentialism, as it deals with the individual and reality. Simone de Beauvoir's mother is 78 and lives alone -- by choice. She has broken the main femur (A bone of the leg situated between the pelvis and knee in human beings. It is the largest and strongest bone in the body. Also called thighbone.). While in the hospital, it is discovered that this is the least of her problems, as she has peritonitis, a blockage in her intestine, a tumor, cancer. She will surely die (almost immediately) without an operation. Simone must decide. Very well written, A Very Easy Death takes place over a 4 week period -- that is how long de Beauvoir's mother lived, after the operation -- cramming as much life and reality between the book covers as possible, without being sappy or tedious.

"I thought of all those who have no one to make that appeal: what agony it must be to feel oneself a defenceless thing, utterly at the mercy of indifferent doctors and over-worked nurses. No hand on the forehead when terror seizes them; no sedative as soon as pain begins to tear them; no lying prattle to fill the silence of the void."

This book is about as real as it gets! --Katharena Eiermann, 2006,, the Realm of Existentialism -- Presidential Hopeful

2006-12-29 | Existential Diva -- Presidential Hopeful (1,000 miles from Nowhere...) | Helpful Votes: 2 | Rating: 4

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Simone,Simone,Simone
Simone,Simone,Simone.
Whenever someone asked me "did you read Sartre?" ,I usually intend to say "yes,lots of books of him ".but actually other than 1-2 books,I heard Sartre a lot from Simone.Anyway,I read this book 10 years ago probably,and as for the other books of her I enjoyed much.It is about the death of her mother.I remembered that in one part of the book ,her mother wanted to hear that Simone becomes religous,but Simone still defended her believes about being a nonreligous woman,eventhough her mother was dying.I really like that ,because no matter what ,she was always behind her ideas,believes,feelings.She was a strong woman.She was smart.I do not admire people,but if I would, I would admire to her.I remember a saying of her which I want to be :"Being a woman,who thinks like a man,and who feels like a woman".In short,in this book you can see her strength as an independent woman again.Enjoy her ,and start to think independtly.Thanks to my dad for putting Simone's books in his library so that I could discover it.

2005-01-31 | Helpful Votes: 4 | Rating: 5

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Forget Sartre; De Beauvoir by way of Camus
While enjoyable, this isn't a particularly great memoir. I find it to be a bit choppy, and most of the characters (including De Beauvoir herself) come off as exceedingly unlikable. Still, the subject of death is an interesting one, and the novel is short enough that anyone who is interested enough to consider reading it really has nothing to lose.

What I do find most interesting, however, is how De Beauvoir (who consults her over-rated companion Sartre in the memoir) seems to be preaching Albert Camus' concept of the quantitative life, and living life with full consciousness. Ultimately, the memoir is rather tragic because De Beauvoirs' dying, once inauthentic mother realizes this on her death bed, when it's too late. It's an excellent message, and although it's better from Camus' pen, it is interesting hearing it from De Beauvoir as well.

2002-08-12 | Helpful Votes: 6 | Rating: 4

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Death Comes Not So Easily
This is a book I would put on a must read list. Death has been spirited away behind closed doors, and banished from our thoughts until it forces its way through, as it always will. This is a must read for anyone working in "Health Care" or with the elderly, also anyone counseling families and the dying. I would hope to find it on a required reading list for medical schools as well. de Beauvoir gives an honest, raw account of her thoughts and fears as her Mother dies; it is a bit reassuring to see that not all of those thoughts are pure and idyllic. She gives any ethics committee a firm reference point in the consideration of assisted death vs. assisted living. Read this book, it will enhance your life.

2002-03-12 | Book Dragon (Tri-Cities, WA USA) | Helpful Votes: 13 | Rating: 5

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I LOVE MY MOMMY!
The connection we have with our mothers is sacred. They are what brought us into this world, but the only thing that could separate us tighter is death. Our spirits and memories are ours to keep, but there is no longer any physical connection. In "A Very Easy Death", a relationship with a mother and daughter had gotten closer because of a death. In this death is what bonds the daughter to give full dedication and devotion to be with her mother. Unfortunately, the death that is connecting both daughter and mother is the death of her mother that is about to occur. Cancer is what is taking her mother away from her. While her mother is suffering and fighting against the cancer, the daughter is there by her side. She notices, "a full-blooded, spirited woman lived on inside her, but a stranger to herself, deformed and mutilated (Beauvoir 43)." Simone, the daughter, sees her full-hearted, spirited mother inside, but the cancer is the stranger of her body that is deforming and mutilating her. Although, Simone shows no suffering when she's around her mother, but she is indeed disturb when she's alone. Her mother is leaving her. Simone state "everyday had an irreplaceable value for her. And she was going to die. She did not know it: but I did. In her name, I revolted against it (Beauvoir 83)." Simone is spending precious time with her mother - spending valuable time, but the cancer is what is stopping her mother to notice it. The cancer has taken over her mother's life. This still does not stop Simone from being with her though. There is nowhere in doubt I'll leave my mother while she's miserable and suffering all at once. I cannot bare to think my mother actually leaving me, but it has to happen eventually. In "A Very Easy Death", Simone's mother demonstrates a role model on her own daughter and me. She displays a true role model that is fighting against her death. I enjoyed this novel dearly. It showed me that I should always keep that connection I have with my mother until the day "I" die.

2001-03-13 (Daly City, CA) | Helpful Votes: 7 | Rating: 5

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LA VIEILLESSE

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The Coming of Age

Description

As the definitive study of the universal problem of growing old, The Coming of Age is "a brilliant achievement" (Marc Slonin, New York Times). What do the words elderly, old, and aged really mean? How are they used by society, and how in turn do they define the generation that we are taught to respect and love but instead castigate and avoid? Most importantly, how is our treatment of this generation a reflection of our society's values and priorities?

In The Coming of Age, Simone de Beauvoir seeks greater understanding of our perception of elders. With bravery, tenacity, and forceful honesty, she guides us on a study spanning a thousand years and a variety of different nations and cultures to provide a clear and alarming picture of "Society's secret shame"--the separation and distance from our communities that the old must suffer and endure. .

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Customer Reviews

"Of all realities, old age is perhaps that of which we retain a purely abstract notion the longest in our lives"...
Simone de Beauvoir places the subject quote, from the "searcher for lost time, himself," Marcel Proust, most fittingly, at the beginning of this seminal work. De Beauvoir was one of the most outstanding French intellectuals of the 20th Century, famous for her novels, "The Mandarins," and "She Came to Stay", as well as one of the longest autobiographies ever, a total of four volumes. She was also, for better or worse, the lifetime companion of Jean-Paul Sartre. Rare is the person who writes one seminal (double-entendres are not intentional, and would hopefully be forgiven) work on a field, and she is most famous for "The Second Sex," originally published in 1949, an extraordinary examination of the role of women in the world's society; a work which was a precursor to the feminist movements in the `60's. Rarer still is the person who can write two seminal works, and despite the fact it never has gained as much "traction" with the reading public, I consider "The Coming of Age," published in 1970, when De Beauvoir was just over 60, to be the equal of "The Second Sex" in terms of its comprehensive, and original examination of a subject that society, as well as many individuals, prefer to, well, as Proust said, retain as an abstract notion. Speaking of an abstract notion, I first read this work when I was under 30, in part since that is what I did; work with the elderly. I decided to re-read it now, since it is far less abstract, being around the age De Beauvoir was when the book was published. It has lost none of its power; now I understand, and have read more of her references.

In the introduction De Beauvoir says that she intends to "break the conspiracy of silence" on what she has been told is a "dismal subject." And indeed she does. As she did in "The Second Sex," she used her phenomenal erudition to cover how old age is perceived in different societies, for example, the Koryak, a northern Siberian people. She also examines the historical record of how societies dealt with aging, from the ancient Greek, Chinese and Jewish societies. Her observation about the power of the elderly in these societies remains fresh. Consider: "Sometimes they had real power, sometime they played the part that, in certain mathematical operations, is played by imaginary numbers-they are necessary for the working out of the problem, but once the answer has been reached, they are eliminated." Concerning the present day, she notes the seeming paradox of how society shuffles the handicapped and the orphans to the sidelines, not to be thought of much, but the same is done to the elderly, though that is the most likely fate for all of us, unlike the other sub-categories. From her voluminous reading she relates the experiences of numerous individuals to aging, and I found the trials and tribulations of Juliette Drouet, who tolerated the infidelities of Victor Hugo, as well as Sophia Tolstoy, who experienced the same with her husband, illuminating.

There is melancholy, and its antidote. She quotes the poet Mallarmé: "This scent of melancholy that the realizing of a dream for who has realized it, even when there is neither failure nor regret." The antidote, she quotes from the ethnologist Georges Condaminas, author of "We Have Eaten the Forest," about the Montagnards in the highland of Vietnam: "It must be understood that when a day is spent traveling is transposed to memory it takes up a far greater "space" than one spent at home.... The play-back time is a magnification of real time."

There is much in the book that is a cause for optimism, and among others, she cites Goya's masterpieces on "The Disasters of War," which he began at 66, and reports in an appendix on numerous centenarians, living fulfilling lives in Brittany.

De Beauvoir concludes though with the rather unrealistic statement that: "Once we have understood what the state of the aged really is, we cannot satisfy ourselves with calling for a more generous `old age' policy, higher pensions, decent housing and organized leisure. It is the whole system that is at issue and our claim cannot be otherwise than radical--change life itself." Well, not much progress has been made on that front over the last 30 years. Whether you're 30, and the notion is still quite abstract, or 60, and the "coming" part is less theoretical, or even 90, this is an essential work on the inevitable process of life.

2009-11-02 (Albuquerque, NM, USA) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 5

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A very economical and simple to operate utility oriented product
As phones go, this is one of the best for the family to enjoy operating, cut tel costs, and simplify your communications network. Its clarity is outstanding and its simple to operate for the entire family.

2008-02-16 (Chicago) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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are old people real people? that is de Beauvoir's question.
are old people real people? that is de Beauvoir's question.
When I first read this book 30 years ago, I thought it was so great I assigned it to my students in a course on gerontology. Now that I am older than the author was when she wrote it, I realize how little she really knew about old people.
de Beauvoir is not a sociologist or a gerontologist, but a professor of philosophy and leftist French writer. She (and her partner Jean Paul Sartre) often took official positions on certain topics as a matter of principle, but with little understanding coming from the heart. She has a clear philosopher's gaze and is utterly pitiless. She doesn't cut people any slack.
Her great contribution here is that she brings a wider attention to what it's like being old in terms of how societies conceptualize old age and in terms of old age as a subjective experience by quoting from the lives and works of famous authors and artists who lived to a ripe old age, defined as anything over 60! How times have changed. Currently the average life expectancy in the US is over 75! (It's over 83 in Kansas).
I now live in a town of 15000 whose founding mayor was elected over the age of 80 (he died in office, suddenly, at 86 in the middle of a development planning project).
Many of my neighbors are pushing 90 or 100 (and over) and keep active walking for miles and swimming for hours daily. Are they real people? You bet! Are some of my neighbors with canes, walkers, hearing aids, cataract surgery and nurse's aides or companions real people? You bet!
The amazing thing about old age is people just want to keep on doing what they are used to doing for as long as they can.
Many of the peculiarities of age that de Beauvoir describes are now known to be due to physical medical problems which are treatable. However, her work is still valid for those last few weeks or months of severe impairment before death.
You just won't feel good after reading this book.

2004-01-04 | Helpful Votes: 21 | Rating: 5

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Understanding our older loved ones
I read this book by when my grandmother was living her last days in a nursing home. There was so much I didn't know about older people -- what is important to them, how they think, what their needs are, how they approach death. Simone de Beauvoir, the celebrated French thinker and writer offers an in-depth study of older people as individuals and older people in society. She also looks at the treatment and psychology of older people across time in western civilization. Anyone who is a caretaker of an older family member or friend, or cares about understanding older people will find this book remarkable and thoughtful.

2001-03-21 (St. Louis, MO United States) | Helpful Votes: 11 | Rating: 4

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The Second Sex

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• ISBN13: 9780307265562
• Contingency: New
• Notes: BUY WITH Self-assurance, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and usefulness to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed

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Newly translated and unabridged in English for the first time, and brilliantly introduced by Judith Thurman, Simone de Beauvoir’s masterpiece weaves together history, philosophy, economics, biology, and a host of other disciplines to analyze the Western notion of “woman” and to explore the power of sexuality.

Sixty years after its initial publication, The Second Sex is still as eye-opening and pertinent as ever. This triumphant and genuinely revolutionary book began as an exceptional woman’s attempt to find out who and what she was. Drawing on extensive interviews with women of every age and station of life, masterfully synthesizing research about women’s bodies and psyches as well as their historic and economic roles, The Second Sex is an encyclopedic and cogently argued document about inequality and enforced “otherness.”

This long-awaited new translation pays particular attention to the existentialist terms and French nuances that may have been misconstrued in the first English edition; restores Beauvoir’s phrasing, rhythms, and tone; and reinstates significant portions of the “Myths” and “History” chapters that were originally cut due to length, including accounts of more than seventy female figures.

A vital and life-changing work that has dramatically revised the way women talk and think about themselves, Beauvoir’s magisterial treatise continues to provoke and inspire.

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Customer Reviews

Quelle horreur!
Toril Moi alerted us to the tragedy of this first unabridged English version of Beauvoir's magnum opus (in LRB 32.3 of 2 Feb 2010); she was shamefully (I would even say viciously) attacked for her pains. Beauvoir can be quite a slog even in English, which therefore needs to be as smooth as possible (compatible with accuracy, ca va sans dire!) Apparently the translators strove for a literal translation. What?!! A literal translation (ie word for word, where feasible) is NO TRANSLATION - something this ungainly beast bears out; it passes the bad translation test (in that it not only reads poorly but the original shows through) in spades. As someone who reads widely in translation (I figure if a book is so honoured, someone thinks it's worth reading) I can assure the good folk at Gallimard that there's all the difference in the world between a sensitive version which highlights both the original's AND the interpreter's skill (as a fine wine reflects both cultivator and blender) and the frankly impotable. Ugh!
Le 2e Sexe? A great book, naturlich - though you may have to learn French to read it (and don't neglect Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, this one accessible in English, as the well-chosen title suggests; the literal French would be well-behaved/subdued (literally 'in order') girl/young woman - yes, even 'girl' would have been wrong, so to get round the age ambiguity the translator plumped for 'daughter' - the euphony is an uncalled-for bonus). As for the bunch of incompetents responsible for commissioning, vetting, greenlighting and finally defending this sorry exercise (you know who you are) they should be held to account; in fact I'm surprised the French government isn't up in arms, as the projection of French culture in the anglophone world must be a priority of theirs - unless they've already given up on us. Somebody better nationalise Gallimard, or rebuild the Bastille (or both)

2010-08-29 (london, england) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 1

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essential question
A big problem anyone who reads this book will have to contend with right up front: De Beauvoir, as a recent biography of her and Sartre (A Dangerous Liason) makes clear, sexually abused young girls. What kind of feminism is that?

2010-04-30 | caro fan (springfield n.j.) | Helpful Votes: 4 | Rating: 5

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The Second Sex

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The Ethics Of Ambiguity

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• Shape: New
• ISBN13: 9780806501604
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Customer Reviews

Love her work!
A short book and as usual of her writing, challenging, entertaining and written to the masses.

2010-04-10 (California) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 5

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A brilliant book - an outline for an ethics rooted in radical freedom
The Ethics of Ambiguity is a first rate philosophical study, and important contribution to ethics, that demonstrates the radical freedom proclaimed by existentialists to carry with it ethical responsibilities. The insight that the essence of human being is freedom, or that we are just what we make of ourselves and there are no absolutes does not lead to nihilism, but rather to the recognition that we are answerable to the others with whom we must collaborate in the construction of human existence.

The core of the book is in the second chapter, where Beauvoir outlines a progressively more adequate series of responses to the awareness of freedom. The child can remain ignorant of the ways in which her choices reflect back upon her, and begin imperceptibly to define who she is and determine a destiny; but in adolescence we all grasp, in varying degrees, that if who we are has been shaped by the free and somewhat arbitrary choices of our parents and guardians, who we will become is up to us. It's easy, at that point, to deny or reject our freedom and fall into complacency or routine, but to do so is to be not fully human, a "sub-man" who rejects responsibility and lives just to live and according to habit. Such are easily manipulated by trends and marketing and political slogans of whatever content.

The first stage along the way of accepting freedom, according to Beauvoir, more pernicious perhaps but still an advance on the "sub-man," is what she calls the "serious man": the one who subordinates freedom to a cause - a war, an ideal, a gang, a program or a religion - whatever it is, and embraces that cause as if it were the one and only thing worth choosing, as if choice itself were not what matters and as if any and all freedoms that stand in the way of the cause are to be suppressed.

Beauvoir outlines a series of "ways of being" - the adventurer, the passionate person, the lover, the artist and intellectual - each of which can be understood as overcoming the deficiencies of the prior, in living up to the demands of freedom. Ultimately, she argues, to be free involves dedicating oneself to the cause of freedom, realizing some good that allows others also to discover that good. Teaching could fit this pattern, but so could revolutionary activity; she argues that in some situations that may be what is called for, and in such situations the ambiguous nature of free activity would be evident: that in order to achieve freedom I must struggle against the choices and activities of those who suppress freedom.

Beauvoir's argument in this book is provocative and compelling, and leaves one with much to reflect on. While some of the works once considered pivotal for the existentialist "movement" may appear to be directly bound to a particular time and place (e.g. the cafes and lounges of postwar Paris), Simone de Beauvoir's excellent little treatise on existentialist ethics has lost none of its relevance or urgency. Highly recommended!

2009-10-27 | film lover, philosophy professor (Florida) | Helpful Votes: 3 | Rating: 5

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Great introduction to existentialism
I first read this book forty years ago for an undergraduate class in social philosophy. I've re-read it five or six times since, and benefitted from each re-reading. Though it was not DeBeauvoir's intention to write an introduction to existentialism, this is the best one available.

What is the meaning of life? It has none save that which we give it, an inescapable process which the author terms "disclosure of being in the world." This view is strongly relativistic, to be sure, providing no basis for preferring a painfully abscessed molar to good sex.

Unlike the early Sartre, moreover, DeBeauvoir recognizes that we disclose being in the world -- learn what it means to be -- in very specific ways, in socially determined contexts. The meanings we discern are bounded by the social worlds of which we are the ongoing creations and which we help to create.

DeBeauvoir's answer to what-is-the-meaning-of-life kinds of questions is not spiritually uplifting, but it's an answer, given without equivocation or hollow appeals to faith. As such, I think it's the right answer. She makes a compelling case.

Can we organize our lives around "disclosure of being in the world?" I don't think so. Its much too abstract, fraught with anomie, positing a sort of Durkheimian nightmare. Still, at least we know where we stand: right in the middle of a universe that anticipates by two or three decades post-modern rejection of any sort of natural and durable foundation.

2009-05-23 | Bob Bickel (huntington, west virginia United States) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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Words sharp as knives, lacking wisdom?
In ethics you find two sorts of reasoning:
1) One that wants to 'delimit' ethics;
allow them to do what they want.
2) One that wants to add further limits to your moral
plane.
Ethics has been argued from a social point of view:
that anthropologically speaking some restrictions
like those on incest and child abuse are universal.
The mid-ground seems to be in marriage laws
and sexual conduct: with the south sea islands on
one side and Boston Ladies of society on the other?
Historically it appears that break down in the values
of family and moral conduct go hand in hand with
decline in the culture. The fall of the Soviet Union
and Communism seems to be tied not with the ideals
of that cultural set, but the adherence to a moral conduct
where the ends justify the means.
Innocents with political and religious ideals died in Siberian camps.
There is no "Ambiguity" in clear wrongs to innocents
to promote a political set of ideas or a leader
like Stalin. Philosophically one can't say
that feminism should be tied to an existentialist doctrine
or that the natural world's lack of ethics means that
we are left to chose our own logical solution
to the decision problems. Harming others in your own selfish self interest isn't in the area of "ambiguity".
Social responsibility is a force that alters history
and is self-organizing: giving up ethical constraints
for your own ends will be the fall.
These are my own sharp words to answer Simone de Beauvior's words.

2008-08-25 | Roger L. Bagula (Lakeside, Ca United States) | Helpful Votes: 2 | Rating: 3

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The Ethics of Ambiguity
Existence.. it's meaning is never fixed, it must constantly be won. This book examines Existence and it's meaning in a humans life. French Philosopher Simone De Beauvoir talks of Nihilism, Surrealism, Existentialism, Objectivity, and a persons ethics and values in life. Beauvoir also tries to resolve some problems Sartre had with trying to work out Existentialist Ethics. Also discusses recognizing your own freedom and taking charge of your life.

Despite being shorter than most Philosophy books this is by no means an easy read. Its a challenging book but it will force you to think. It is brilliant. This is Philosophy at its finest.

2008-03-13 (Pennsylvania United States) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 5

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