Reviews tagging 'Death'

For Small Creatures Such as We: Rituals for Finding Meaning in Our Unlikely World by Sasha Sagan

2 reviews

adrizeuza's review against another edition

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emotional hopeful inspiring reflective slow-paced

4.5

This book was super moving to me, since I also lost a parent in my tenage years and am now considering motherhood as well as what I want my spirituality to look and feel like, authentically. A perfect mix of autobiography and wider considerations on the importance and variety of ritual for humans, in a secular atheist way that never diminishes other faiths and religions. If you are looking for a catalogue of rituals, this will probably disappoint you, but if you want a reflective/instrospective read, I highly reccomend this book.
It would have been a 5☆ read if it weren't for a chapter about food rituals which I found a bit superficial and slightly fatphobic, contrasting with the quality of the rest of the book.
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bluejayreads's review against another edition

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informative medium-paced

3.5

After getting so much out of Casper ter Kuile’s The Power of Ritual, I had really high hopes for this one. And I think those high hopes are ultimately what ended up being the problem. 

I had expected this to be similar to The Power of Ritual – why humans like and/or need rituals, what makes them meaningful, and what kinds of rituals we do. I was also hoping for some more how-to, some sort of instruction manual for creating my own meaningful rituals in a secular life. But that’s not really what I got. This is mostly memoir, combining Sasha’s memories of her father and her childhood, the secular rituals she experienced growing up, her experience with Jewish rituals as a secular Jew, and her hopes for ritual-making with her baby daughter. 

It’s divided into chapters focusing on the different kinds of rituals that humans have done across the centuries. The main themes are seasons of nature (winter, spring, summer, fall) and seasons of the human life (birth, puberty, marriage, death). Sasha touches briefly on traditions across the world around these seasons, and illustrates each one with her life and the rituals she experienced – either from the wider American culture, her Jewish heritage, or ones she or her parents created – around those seasons. 

This feels in many ways like an overview. I learned a lot more about Jewish life-phase rituals from Here All Along and more about seasons of nature rituals from my own research during my pagan phase. I did find the insights about how many disparate rituals can be grouped under the categories of “seasons of nature” or “important times in the human life cycle” interesting, and I appreciated the connections Sasha drew between so many different religious and cultural traditions. But the heart of this book is memoir – Sasha’s life as Carl Sagan’s daughter, her childhood, and her hopes for her daughter in the future. I think I would have been more interested in the memoir aspect if I knew anything about Carl Sagan and had that connection to draw on. 

This is not a bad book. In fact, it was quite interesting in a lot of ways. I had just hoped for more information about how to set up rituals and make them meaningful in a secular life, and did not expect it to be so much memoir. 
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