The Mansion of Happiness: A History of Life and Death
Written by Jill Lepore
Narrated by Coleen Marlo
5/5
()
About this audiobook
Renowned Harvard scholar and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore has composed 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.
Jill Lepore
Jill Lepore is a professor of American history at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her books include Book of Ages, a finalist for the National Book Award; New York Burning, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; The Name of War, winner of the Bancroft Prize; and The Mansion of Happiness, which was short-listed for the 2013 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
More audiobooks from Jill Lepore
These Truths: A History of the United States Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Related to The Mansion of Happiness
Related audiobooks
Coming of Age: Growing Up in the Twentieth Century Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The End is Always Near: Apocalyptic Moments, from the Bronze Age Collapse to Nuclear Near Misses Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Swerve: How the World Became Modern Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Ill Fares the Land Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5How to Be: Life Lessons from the Early Greeks Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Unfamiliar Fishes Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Crack in the Edge of the World Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Memory Chalet Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Beyond Measure: The Hidden History of Measurement from Cubits to Quantum Constants Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Lafayette in the Somewhat United States Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Ghost Map Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5When We Cease to Understand the World Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Professor and The Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Elixir: A History of Water and Humankind Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Book of Humans: A Brief History of Culture, Sex, War, and the Evolution of Us Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Assassination Vacation Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5How to Live: Or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Smoke and Ashes: Opium's Hidden Histories Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Meaning of Human Existence Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Wordy Shipmates Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The President and the Assassin: McKinley, Terror, and Empire at the Dawn of the American Century Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
United States History For You
The House of Hidden Meanings: A Memoir Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of the Donner Party Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Killing the Witches: The Horror of Salem, Massachusetts Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Wright Brothers Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Bowling Alone: Revised and Updated: The Collapse and Revival of American Community Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Ghosts of Honolulu: A Japanese Spy, A Japanese American Spy Hunter, and the Untold Story of Pearl Harbor Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Astor: The Rise and Fall of an American Fortune Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Killing the Guys Who Killed the Guy Who Killed Lincoln: A Nutty Story About Edwin Booth and Boston Corbett Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/51776 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Last Castle: The Epic Story of Love, Loss, and American Royalty in the Nation’s Largest Home Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Waco: David Koresh, the Branch Davidians, and A Legacy of Rage Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Untold History of the United States Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Book of Charlie Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5John Adams Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of September 11, 2001 Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Cuba (Winner of the Pulitzer Prize): An American History Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Valiant Women: The Extraordinary American Servicewomen Who Helped Win World War II Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Land of Delusion: Out on the edge with the crackpots and conspiracy-mongers remaking our shared reality Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5UFO: The Inside Story of the US Government's Search for Alien Life Here—and Out There Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for The Mansion of Happiness
6 ratings1 review
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A collection of Jill Lepore's New Yorker stories woven into a logical sequence and tied firmly together in the last pages by Jill as she describes her personal intersection with each of the book's subjects.