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It is Better to be Poor and Alive than to be Rich and Dead: " Is he Alive ?"
Paperback
PhilosophyGeneral United States History
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Publisher: Independently Published
Pages: 32
Weight: 0.13
Height: 0.07 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
In 1864, in the middle of a war, Abraham Lincoln took the time to write a letter to a mother who had lost five sons. It couldn't bring anyone back. It could only say: I see what this cost you.
That letter is where this book begins.
It Is Better to Be Poor and Alive Than to Be Rich and Dead is a work of personal philosophy about what we trade for the idea of a successful life, and what it actually costs. Moving between history, research, and memoir, the book traces one argument across four parts: where our idea of success actually came from, what it has asked people to pay, what a different way of measuring a life might look like, and how to actually live it.
Along the way, the book examines Abraham Lincoln's letter to Lydia Bixby, Julia Ward Howe's 1870 Mother's Day Proclamation, the deaths of three young professionals from overwork in London, Jakarta, and Tokyo, the 1994 Rwandan genocide, Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and Henry IV, and findings from the Harvard Study of Adult Development, the longest-running study of adult life ever conducted. Throughout, it returns to a single, real image: a grandmother who sets a place at her table every evening for a son the world has stopped being impressed by, and has never once treated that as a loss.
The book is organized into four parts:
Part One, The Accounting, examines where our idea of a successful life came from. Part Two, The Cost, looks at what that idea has asked people to pay. Part Three, The Reckoning, looks for a different way to measure a life. Part Four, The Living, asks what it actually means to live that way.
Written for readers questioning ambition, burnout, grief, or what they've inherited without choosing, this is a book about presence over accumulation, and about what it means to still be at the table.
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