Renowned Harvard scholar and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore has written a strikingly original, ingeniously conceived and beautifully crafted history of American ideas about life and death from before the cradle to beyond the grave. Investigating the surprising origins of the stuff of everyday life, from board games to breast pumps, the author argues that the age of discovery, Darwin, and the Space Age turned ideas about life on earth topsy-turvy....