History of Suicide: Voluntary Death in Western Culture

In this compact and illuminating history, Georges Minois examines how a culture's attitudes about suicide reflect its larger beliefs and values—attitudes toward life and death, duty and honor, pain and pleasure. Minois begins his survey with classical Greece and Rome, where suicide was acceptable—even heroic—under some circumstances. With the rise of Christianity, however, suicide was unequivocally condemned as self—murder and an i...