Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, The Denial of Death explores how people and cultures around the world have reacted to the concept of death from celebrated cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker.Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1974 and the culmination of a life’s work, The Denial of Death is Ernest Becker’s brilliant and impassioned answer to the “why” of human existence. In bold contrast to the predominant Freudian school of thought, Becker tackles t...

Uses the disciplines of psychology, anthropology, sociology and psychiatry to explain what makes people act the way they do.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, The Denial of Death explores how people and cultures around the world have reacted to the concept of death from celebrated cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker.Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1974 and the culmination of a life’s work, The Denial of Death is Ernest Becker’s brilliant and impassioned answer to the “why” of human existence. In bold contrast to the predominant Freudian school of thought, Becker tackles t...

The Birth and Death of Meaning uses the disciplines of psychology, anthropology, sociology, and psychiatry to explain what makes people act the way they do.

The Jack-Roller tells the story of Stanley, a pseudonym Clifford Shaw gave to his informant and co-author, Michael Peter Majer. Stanley was sixteen years old when Shaw met him in 1923 and had recently been released from the Illinois State Reformatory at Pontiac, after serving a one-year sentence for burglary and jack-rolling (mugging),Vivid, authentic, this is the autobiography of a delinquent—his experiences, influences, attitudes, and values. The Jack-Roller hel...

Young Hugh Tregarthen has grown up in a seafaring Cornish family, but is not born to follow the family tradition. Against his mother's wishes, he is coxswain of a lifeboat -- an important job along the treacherous coastline, which makes his mother proud, despite her misgivings. One morning, as he sets out for his boat Janet, invalid Mrs. Tregarthen warns her son of an ominous dream she had the previous night. He laughs it off... but sometimes, dreams come true.