Customer Reviews

Fear: A Cultural History

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Being buried alive, theatre fires, nightmares, phobias, war, nuclear holocaust, and of course terrorism. Any of these sound like the subjects of the latest "Your Recommended" films? I thought so.

Joanna Bourke has written a reasoned account of how fears such as these have developed and changed in the social consciousness over the last 150 years or so. Changes in technology and the subtle march of progress have meant that we no longer have to fear certain ills, but that others have taken their place. For example, the rule that a doctor must confirm a patient to be dead was campaigned for vigorously by a group of concerned citizens terrified of being buried alive. They had a gruesome evidence base in the worryingly high proportion of excavated coffins with fingernail marks on the inside. Fast-forward 100 or so years and we are no longer afraid of being buried alive; we are afraid of being kept alive through tubes and machines despite posessing a body that's well past dead.

Do not worry, this isn't a book to give you nightmares. In fact the somewhat more reassuring conclusion is that actually fear has been the catalyst for humanity to be propelled forward. That we have nothing to fear from fear itself...