History of Suicide Has Timely Arrival

Last month the federal government released a plan to combat the eighth leading cause of death in the United States. By chance, I had just completed reading History of Suicide: Voluntary Death in Western Culture (Johns Hopkins University Press, $18.95 paperback).

The compelling book by Georges Minois, translated from the French by Lydia G. Cochrane, takes the reader on a journey that inspects the attitudes toward suicide from the Middle Ages until the present.

Suicide has a long record of being looked upon with disdain and disrespect by those who lived through some of our most harrowing times. According to Minois, it was routine that those who took their own lives were often punished by such puzzling actions as being hanged, stabbed and dragged through the streets or outlying towns of Western Europe.

With the arrival of more enlightened times, societies still tended to find suicide as not acceptable to those who subscribed to Christianity. The book contains more than 300 pages of detailed analysis of the attitudes that often changed as those societies saw themselves as becoming modern.

Today, suicides total 30,000 annually. An estimated 650,000 attempt to kill themselves every year.

What can be done to reduce suicides? One way, according to Surgeon General David Satcher, would assure that the depressed get help long before they would turn to suicide as a last resort.

Republican Sen. Pete Domenici of New Mexico wants to expand health insurance to better cover those who may be candidates for killing themselves.

History of Suicide is a book that takes a comprehensive look at a troubling national problem.

GIRL BESIDE HIM -- Novelist and short story writer Cris Mazza has a new book and that’s time for avid readers of experimental fiction to take notice.

In Girl Beside Him (Fiction Collective Two, $13.95 paperback), Mazza takes a look at relationships, particularly those of people placed together in a somewhat wild arena. A wildlife biologist and his assistant, a young woman, find themselves in a remote town while searching for wild cougars. The book examines the relationship between these unlikely co-workers, as writer Mazza forces her characters to examine themselves and then face a crisis when the townspeople pose a threat to them.

There’s lots of sexual doings, as Mazza takes the reader on a trip that’s not always very comfortable. Girl Beside Him is another demonstration of skill by a writer who has received much praise from critics and one of these days will enjoy sales success as well.

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