November of the Soul
The Enigma of Suicide
Introduction
During the months that followed September 11, 2001, I could not help noticing what pains the op-ed pages of America's newspapers took to make clear that the terrorists who steered jets into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon were not real suicides. The implication was that these men had nothing in common with the troubled souls we think of -- and feel compassion toward -- when we hear the profoundly unsettling word suicide.
It is understandable that we would be reluctant to find any commonality between unhappy people who deserve our sympathy and mass murderers -- and, to be sure, there are great differences. And yet the terrorists were suicides, albeit of a particular but hardly unique strand in the history of self-destructi ... read full excerpt from November of the Soul: The Enigma of Suicide ebook
