Eve Joseph0.0 A journey into the land of death and dying seen through the lens of art and the imagination
Part memoir, part meditation on death itself, In the Slender Margin is an exploration of death from an “insider’s” point of view. Using the threads of her brother’s early death and her twenty years of work at a hospice, Joseph utilizes history, religion, philosophy, literature, personal anecdote, mythology, poetry and pop culture to discern the unknowable and to illuminate her travels through the land of the dying. The book is neither an academic text nor a self-help manual; rather, it is a rumination on death, dying and the mystery that awaits us all.
Rather than relying solely on narrative, In the Slender Margin gains momentum from a buildup of thematic resonances. In the process of thinking deeply about death, Joseph finds the brother she lost as a young girl. She wrote this book as a way to understand what she had seen: the mysterious and the horrendous.
Replete with literary allusions and references ranging from Joan Didion and Susan Sontag to D.H. Lawrence and Voltaire, among many other literary voices, the result is an absorbing and inspired consideration of how we die and how we deal with death.
Julie Angus0.0 When Julie Angus visits her relatives in Syria, where they continue a centuries-old tradition of making olive oil, she understands that the olive is at the very core of who they are. Her curiosity piqued, she begins to wonder about the origins and history of this fruit that has meant so much to them. Angus, her husband, and their ten-month-old son embark on a Mediterranean voyage to retrace the route of the Phoenicians and discover who ate the first olive and learned to make oil from it, why it became such an influential commodity for many of the greatest civilizations, and how it expanded from its earliest roots in the Middle East. As they sail the dazzling waters of the Mediterranean, Angus and her husband collect samples from ancient trees, testing them to determine where the first olive tree originated. They also feast on inky black tapenades in Cassis, nibble on codfish and chickpeas creamed in olive oil in Sardinia, witness the harvesting of olives in Greece, and visit perhaps the oldest olive tree in the world, on Crete.
