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Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck
Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck: Why We Can't Look Away | Eric G. Wilson
1 post | 1 reading | 2 to read
Why cant we look away? Whether we admit it or not, were fascinated by evil. Dark fantasies, morbid curiosities, Schadenfreude: as conventional wisdom has it, these are the symptoms of our wicked side, and we succumb to them at our own peril. But were still compelled to look whenever we pass a grisly accident on the highway, and theres no slaking our thirst for gory entertainments like horror movies and police procedurals. What makes these spectacles so irresistible? In Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck, the scholar Eric G. Wilson sets out to discover the source of our attraction to the gruesome, drawing on the findings of biologists, sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, philosophers, theologians, and artists. A professor of English literature and a lifelong student of the macabre, Wilson believes theres something nourishing in darkness. To repress death is to lose the feeling of life, he writes. A closeness to death discloses our most fertile energies. His examples are legion and startling in their diversity. Citing everything from elephant graveyards and Susan Sontags On Photography to the Tiger Woods sex scandal and Steel Magnolias, Wilson finds heartening truths wherever he confronts death. In Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck, the perverse is never far from the sublime. The result is a powerful and delightfully provocative defense of what it means to be humanfor better and for worse.
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Clwojick
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Getting my #NFN2020 stack all ready for next month! @rsteve388

Mitch That‘s a big stack 😮👍🏼 4y
Ruthiella @Mitch For most readers it‘s a big stack. For Clwojick though, that‘s only maybe a week‘s worth of reading! 😅 4y
Clwojick @Mitch @Ruthiella LOL! 🤦🏻‍♀️ Especially of that week falls when my husband is working at the mine, and not home. Two weeks out of every month I read my little heart out while trying to distract myself from missing him. ☺️ 4y
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Sleepswithbooks The little ghost picture 🥰 4y
Clwojick @Stacypatrice gotta love holiday crafts! Can‘t wait to start crafting for Xmas 😀 4y
Twainy Added Everything is Perfect to my Hoopla Loan queue 😁 4y
Smarkies Looks like an excellent stack. I have managed to get mine together as well.... Now wondering whether I should add Educated to it. 🤔😂😂 4y
alisiakae I just grabbed quite a few nonfiction books that are also on the GR Choice Awards nominations list! And of course, I preordered this November release 4y
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