"In the teeming ranks of the American Professoriat, you could argue that Eric G. Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck necessarily deals with a host of grim subjects, yet there are also instances of unqualified beauty." - Kevin Canfield, Star-Tribune (Minneapolis) A hybrid of memoir, journalim and theory, investigates what this impulse tells us about ourselves and how it might inspire constructive reactions like compassion. 11 attacks to Dante's tormented verse and Goya's paintings of cannibals, Wilson makes a strong case that humans are natural-born rubberneckers. "Invoking everything from horror movies and television news footage of the Sept.
HARD TO LOOK AWAY FROM A TRAIN WRECK ARCHIVE
" fluent and comfortable, whether he is poking for clues in the bewildering complexity of Edmund Burke's sublime, as experienced in the stomach-dropping irresistibilty of, say, a tornado the Jungian shadow, that archive of everything we hate about ourselves, those destructive crazes and unadmitted tendencies without recognition of which we would not be whole or the simple, malicious pleasure of another's misfortunes." - Peter Lewis, The Barnes & Noble Review does a thorough job of examining the people who can't look away." - Nona Nelson, The Roanoke Times "Ruminations of an exceptionally intelligent academic on why people-himself among the guilty parties-seem to search out and enjoy instances of human pain and suffering. From fairy tales to crime dramas, they hit us where we are most human." - Kate Tuttle, The Boston Globe " reassures: enjoying grotesque, horrible, frightening images is a natural impulse. It's hard, as one reads this fascinating book, not to see quite a bit of ourselves." - David Pitt, Booklist "Wilson explores with zeal and a great deal of wit. "Mixing anecdotes, arguments and his own quirky persona, the author of Against Happiness delivers a provocative meditation on morbid curiosity and the pleasure of seeing others suffer." - The Times-Picayune (New Orleans) The book offers heaps of terribly tantalizing topics." - Chris Jozefowicz, Rue Morgue Wilson's guidance is personal, engaging, and convincing. Wilson draws on philosophers, poets, psychologists, filmmakers and more to build a case that 'an eager, open-minded interest in the macabre' provides 'a special invitation to think about life's meanings'.
Wilson keeps hearing a voice within that tells him to 'look.' He follows this instinct, energized by the idea that his thoughtful connoisseurship of the world's darkness is good-noble, even. "A leisurely, light-footed overview of our cultural obsession with doom, gloom, and gore." - Josh Rothman, The Boston Globe "Wilson is provocative, entertaining and above all honest." - Chris Tucker, The Dallas Morning News
HARD TO LOOK AWAY FROM A TRAIN WRECK SERIAL
Aristotle, Freud, Kant, Goya and Hardy all make appearances, alongside an assortment of sociopaths and serial murderers." - John Wilwol, NPR.org The book's slim, peripatetic chapters cover an awful lot of erudite territory, as Wilson draws ideas and research from a delightful grab bag of academics, artists and thinkers. What is the meaning of suffering? What is the significance of death?. Instead, it simply aims to help readers gain 'a fulfilling response to two of life's greatest, most pressing and persistent questions. Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck isn't some holier-than-thou polemic out to cure us of our dark leanings. sets out to explain what lies beneath our collective fascination with death and suffering. The result is a powerful and delightfully provocative defence of what it means to be human - for better and for worse. In "Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck", the perverse is never far from the sublime. Citing everything from elephant graveyards and Susan Sontag's "On Photography" to the Tiger Woods sex scandal and Steel Magnolias, Wilson finds heartening truths wherever he confronts death. "A closeness to death discloses our most fertile energies." His examples are legion and startling in their diversity. "To repress death is to lose the feeling of life," he writes.
A professor of English literature and a lifelong student of the macabre, Wilson believes there's something nourishing in darkness.
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. What makes these spectacles so irresistible? In "Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck", the scholar Eric G.
But we're still compelled to look whenever we pass a grisly accident on the highway, and there's no slaking our thirst for gory entertainments like horror movies and police procedurals. 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. Whether we admit it or not, we're fascinated by evil.
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