Ars Moriendi Archives - Bob on Books

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Indie Bookstore Day 2025

Today is Indie Bookstore Day in the United States. This is the twelfth year for Indie booksellers who are part of the American Booksellers Association to band together to host special events at over 1600 bookstores in all fifty states. It seems to me a wonderful way to celebrate the vibrant and growing presence of Indie booksellers.

I think of the bookseller I interviewed recently at the Birch Tree Bookery in Marion, Ohio. Marion is one of the small to medium size county seats in Ohio. This husband and wife bookselling team launched the store a couple years back in a bookstore desert. The nearest store was at least 20 miles away. They are now in their third location, each larger than the last as they’ve built a reading community. No Barnes & Noble is going to move here. And this is what Indies are doing across the country.

The long and the short of it is that today is a very good day to visit your nearest Indie (the Indie Bookstore Day site will help you find one). Not only will you find fun, bookish activities. You may also find your next great read.

Can’t make it in person? Most are set up to take orders. I placed an order at my favorite Indie since I won’t be able to support them in person. If you can’t figure out how to order from the store, you can also order through Bookshop.org which has raised nearly $38 million for local bookstores.

Our Indie bookstores are a crucial ingredient to making our towns places livable, interesting, unique places. They are gathering places in a world lacking good third places. And they are far better than algorithms when it comes to matching people with books they will love.

Five Articles Worth Reading

It’s National Poetry Month. And who would have thought of Iowa City as a poetry mecca? ” ‘Poe t ry City: Iowa City, Iowa” tells the story of a college town, the home of a famed writing program and how they’ve kept it “weird”–a center for poetry where one might never expect it.

Tomie dePaola’s Strega Nona is turning 50. Elisabeth Egan has a unique take, which she offers in “I’ve Read ‘Strega Nona’ 100 Times. Now I Feel Sorry for Her Sidekick.” She thinks Big Anthony has not gotten the credit he is due.

Did you know that Isaac Asimov wrote some of his books under the pen name Paul French? And did you know that a reviewer who hated Asimov’s writing loved that of Paul French, amusing Asimov to no end. You can read all about it in “When Isaac Asimov Decided to Secretly Write Under the Name Paul French.”

I’ve seen pictures of the J.P. Morgan Library, in New York City. It is an amazing personal library. “Ambition, Discipline, Nerve” is a fascinating article about the librarian Morgan hired to build that library.

You would think people of faith would die well. In “Fragments for the End of Life” Justin Hawkins reviews Burdened Agency: Christian Theology and End-of-Life Ethics by Travis Pickell, a book that explains why this is so.

Quote of the Week

Charlotte Brontë was born April 21, 1816. She makes an observation we desperately need in our culture of grievance:

“Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity, or registering wrongs.”

Miscellaneous Musings

As we get older, it becomes harder to find people further along than we. Luci Shaw is in her late 90’s and just published another poetry book, An Incremental Life. If I can grow older half as well as she, that will be a good thing.

He spent much of his work as a book editor, work he did well. In my last job, part of my work involved editing, work for which I had no experience. He gave me a crash course. As a fellow “retiree,” one of the things Andy LePeau does is review books. I love seeing how he does it, particularly when we’ve read the same book. I commend his blog, Andy Unedited.

This week marked the passing of Pope Francis. He died on Easter Monday and on the day before Earth Day. He lived the Easter hope and taught us to care for our common home. If you have not read it, LAUDATO SI’, an encyclical letter, is a marvelous and sweeping statement of a vision for caring for our common home, inspired by his namesake, Francis of Assisi. Requiescat in pace.

Next Week’s Reviews

Monday: James Crossley and Chris Keith, eds., The Next Quest for the Historical Jesus

Tuesday: Michael Innes, The Open House

Wednesday: Ida Friederike Gorres, John Henry Newman: A Life Sacrificed

Thursday: The Month in Reviews: April 2025

Friday: William F. Buckley, Jr., Tucker’s Last Stand

So, that’s The Weekly Wrap for April 20-26, 2025!

Find past editions of The Weekly Wrap under The Weekly Wrap heading on this page

The Lost Art of Dying, L. S. Dugdale. New York: Harper One, 2020.

Summary: A physician challenges our over-medicalized treatment of the dying, advocating a recovery of the “art of dying,” which also makes it possible to live well.

He died three times in one night. Mr. Turner was an elderly man dying of metastatic cancer that had invaded much of his body. But the family insisted everything be done to keep him alive. So when he “coded,” much of the hospital mobilized to resuscitate him. Chest compressions broke frail ribs. Breathing tubes were inserted. Injections of powerful drugs were injected to restart the heart. This happened twice more that night. The final time, the team worked twenty minutes to no avail. Mr. Turner was pronounced dead. The author, one of the physicians on this team asks whether this is a good way to die.

This incident, during her residency, began a process of questioning about what it meant to die well, leading to her discovery of the Ars Moriendi, The Art of Dying, a fourteenth century handbook arising out of the plagues, when anyone might expect to die an early death. Dying well begins with recognizing one’s finitude, reckoning on and appropriately planning for one’s death. Dying well happens best in community, where the dying acknowledges wrongs and seeks forgiveness, where love is expressed, and where bystanders rehearse their own death. Dugdale also talks about how context matters, and the preference where appropriate care can be given, for death at home, and in the hospital, only when that affords the best care.

Often our inability to die well, and the actions that hinder dying well reflect our fear of death. She confronts the real terror, even for the religious, of the unknown void of death. Dugdale’s counsel is that each of us has to wrestle with what it means to die into life. In an extended reflection on the Isenheim Altarpiece, she considers what happens to the body in disease and death–its corruption into dust. She describes the reality summarized in one terrified patient’s words–“I don’t know what I believe”–and the vital work of facing the existential questions of meaning to both live and die well.

Her final chapters describe the rituals that follow death, and the wisdom in the Jewish tradition around grief. She concludes with some recommendations that might form a modern Art of Dying. Think twice about hospitalization. Discern when further treatment is futile. Live well at the end through good, and early, palliative care when death is imminent. Reconsider resuscitation. Start giving away your stuff. Live with purpose. Die in community.

The book concludes with a series of ink drawings by Michael W. Dugger, similar to the woodcuts in the original Ars Moriendi around the themes of each chapter of the book. They are a fitting way to invite us to reflect once more on this book’s message: we desperately need to recover the art of dying well. It isn’t to be found in the over-medicalized, hospital-centric practices of our modern way of death. Nor is it to be found in the denial of our finitude, our efforts to suppress our fears.

This book gives much to think about in our current pandemic, including the terrible tragedy of how it results in lonely deaths. A blessing upon the caregivers who treat the dying with dignity and compassion! It also makes me wonder if our inability to pursue for an extended time the disciplines that guard our health and that of our neighbors reflects the fact that we haven’t done the work of preparing to die well. We act as if we are invulnerable. We risk our lives for a night of clubbing. To not adequately reckon with death is to not adequately treasure the gift of the life we have, the community with whom we share it, and betrays the thinness of our efforts to consider the existential questions of life. All this suggests that this book could not have come at a better time.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher. The opinions I have expressed are my own.