Blood: The Stuff of Life

by Lawrence Hill

Overview

Selected for The Globe 100 Books in 2013.

With the 2013 CBC Massey Lectures, bestselling author Lawrence Hill offers a provocative examination of the scientific and social history of blood, and on the ways that it unites and divides us today.

Blood runs red through every person’s arteries and fulfills the same functions in every human being. The study of blood has advanced our understanding of biology and improved medical treatments, but its cultural and social representations have divided us perennially. Blood pulses through religion, literature, and the visual arts. Every time it pools or spills, we learn a little more about what brings human beings together and what pulls us apart. For centuries, perceptions of difference in our blood have separated people on the basis of gender, race, class, and nation. Ideas about blood purity have spawned rules about who gets to belong to a family or cultural group, who enjoys the rights of citizenship and nationality, what privileges one can expect to be granted or denied, whether you inherit poverty or the right to rule over the masses, what constitutes fair play in sport, and what defines a person’s identity.

Blood: The Stuff of Life is a bold meditation on blood as an historical and contemporary marker of identity, belonging, gender, race, class, citizenship, athletic superiority, and nationhood.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781770893245
Publisher:	House of Anansi Press Inc
Publication date:	09/28/2013
Series:	The CBC Massey Lectures
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	445 KB

About the Author

Lawrence Hill is an award-winning Canadian writer whose novel The Book of Negroes was a national bestseller. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario. Visit Lawrence Hill's website: http://www.lawrencehill.com/

Editorial Reviews

★ 10/14/2013
Anansi presents this year's CBC Massey Lectures, written and delivered by noted author Lawrence Hill. Hill, who is perhaps best known for his bestselling The Book of Negroes (published as Someone Knows My Name in the U.S.), expounds on the subject of blood, not so much in the sense of hematology—although that does get discussed—as on how the metaphors that use blood, from purity to lineage, have shaped human societies, often for the worse. On balance, where hematology, enabling increasingly powerful medical techniques at the cost of occasional missteps, blood as a symbol seems to function mainly to give humans reasons to finely divide populations along arbitrary kinship lines, to inspire brutal violence and genocide and to justify exploitative social orders. Blood is necessary for life, but it has also come to symbolize violence; Hill's lectures explain why. His prose is transparent and compelling, and while his organization is at times idiosyncratic, it serves his ends. Although it offers some depressing views of humanity, the book is as enthralling as it is informative. The reasons for Hill's success as a writer are apparent throughout; if he were not already established as an author to follow, this work would accomplish that. Agent: Ellen Levine, Trident Media Group. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly