A Tour of Bones: Facing Fear and Looking for Life

A Tour of Bones: Facing Fear and Looking for Life

by Denise Inge (Author)

Synopsis

Author, academic and adventurer, Denise Inge grew up in a large and rambunctious family on the east coast of America. She crossed the Sahara, charmed snakes in Marrakech and cycled the Adirondack mountains but her latest adventure is an interior one. It starts with the discovery that her house is built on a crypt full of human skeletons. Facing her fear of these strangers' bones takes her to other charnel houses in Europe and on a journey into the meaning of bones themselves. This exploration, though it began before her diagnosis with an inoperable sarcoma, takes on a new significance when the question of living well in the face of mortality abruptly ceases to be hypothetical. A Tour of Bones is a passionate testament to the conviction that living is more than not dying, and that contemplating mortality is not about being prepared to die but about being prepared to live.

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More Information

Format: Hardcover
Pages: 224
Edition: First Edition
Publisher: Bloomsbury Continuum
Published: 06 Nov 2014

ISBN 10: 1472913078
ISBN 13: 9781472913074
Book Overview: A life-enhancing exploration of how to live well in the face of mortality

Media Reviews
Exquisite ... It is, quite simply, a gem * Alexander McCall Smith *
An erudite and inspiring journey into what we lose, what remains and what we can pass on. A Tour of Bones is wise, kind, magpie-curious and shines with a love of life * David Mitchell *
A beautifully-written book ... One which celebrates not death but life, and how, by confronting the fear and inevitability of our end, we can embrace life and live it more abundantly * P D James *
Sceptical, funny, frank and shot through with a sparkling zest for life * Spectator *
Denise Inge's jewel of a memoir is suffused with an indomitable spirit * Times *
This is a book full of tenderness, hope and love * Times Higher Education *
A thoughtful writer who believed her terminal diagnosis made life more delicious, Inge's bone tour illuminates the expansive difference between the humdrum everyday and heaped mortality. An adventurous and macabre tribute to the eternal longevity of human bones. * Kirkus Reviews *
This beautiful, profound, honest, and at times deliciously witty book moves with seeming effortlessness between the small things that detain us and the great truths that enclose us, the domestic and the eternal ... A testament of courage, vision and thought that makes life burn more brightly in [its] readers * Times Literary Supplement *
Author Bio
A leading authority on the 17th century poet and mystic Thomas Traherne, Denise Inge's Traherne anthology Happiness and Holiness was named in the Spectator's `Books of the Year' 2008. She published three books on Traherne as well as numerous academic articles, and features and reviews for the TLS, the Episcopal New Yorker and the Church Times. She had been a guest speaker at the Hay Festival, Words by the Water, Dartington and Greenbelt and the Ledbury Poetry Festival. She died just as this book was going to press.