{"product_id":"9780300209365","title":"Stay: A History of Suicide and the Arguments Against It","description":"\u003cp\u003eWorldwide, more people die by suicide than by murder, and many more are left behind to grieve. Despite distressing statistics that show suicide rates rising, the subject, long a taboo, is infrequently talked about. In this sweeping intellectual and cultural history, poet and historian Jennifer Michael Hecht channels her grief for two friends lost to suicide into a search for history’s most persuasive arguments against the irretrievable act, arguments she hopes to bring back into public consciousness. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFrom the Stoics and the Bible to Dante, Shakespeare, Wittgenstein, and such twentieth-century writers as John Berryman, Hecht recasts the narrative of our “secular age” in new terms. She shows how religious prohibitions against self-killing were replaced by the Enlightenment’s insistence on the rights of the individual, even when those rights had troubling applications. This transition, she movingly argues, resulted in a profound cultural and moral loss: the loss of shared, secular, logical arguments against suicide. By examining how people in other times have found powerful reasons to stay alive when suicide seems a tempting choice, she makes a persuasive intellectual and moral case against suicide.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Yale University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47023979397360,"sku":"9780300209365","price":18.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9780300209365_p0.jpg?v=1763670402","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9780300209365","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}