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Cliffs of Despair: A Journey to the Edge, by Tom Hunt
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Beachy Head is a bit of quintessential England–a seaside promontory where green pastures roll to the edge of chalk cliffs, a place of sheep and wind and ineffable beauty. But it is also a major landmark on the map of self-inflicted death. Since 1965, some five hundred people have ended their lives by jumping or driving or simply walking off the 535-foot cliffs, making Beachy Head one of the most popular suicide spots in the world. And still they come, every week another one or two–the young and the old, the terminally ill and the vigorously healthy, the bereft, the insane, the despairing. Why here? Why so many? One chilly English spring, American writer and teacher Tom Hunt left his home and family and journeyed to this bucolic landscape to find out.
In a narrative that seamlessly weaves together personal memoir, history, travelogue, and investigative journalism, Hunt recounts a season of disturbing revelations (including that Princess Diana allegedly came here intending to jump). Still reeling from a suicide in his own family, Hunt arrives in England obsessed with Beachy Head’s grisly mystique, yet utterly unsure of what he would discover.
Gradually, with typical English reserve, the people who haunt this extraordinary place release their secrets. Servers in the local tavern–known among residents as the Last Stop Pub–whisper about their encounters with hollow-eyed men and women in their final hours. The celebrated local witch asserts his belief that the place was once used for human sacrifice. The kindly coroner provides access to suicide notes, photographs, and the Sudden Death file. “It’s a very cold solution,” confides a wheelchair-bound ex-hippie who miraculously survived his own jump.
In the course of wrenching interviews with bereft family members, watchful taxi drivers, and brave rescue workers, it dawns on Hunt that in each of us is a will to die every bit as tenacious and unyielding as the desire to live–and that Beachy Head stiffens and heightens this death wish. It’s a stage that all but begs to be leapt from. A work of terrible sadness and harrowing revelations, Cliffs of Despair is the account of an unforgettable journey to a place where beauty and death collide.
- Sales Rank: #1375290 in Books
- Published on: 2006-01-24
- Released on: 2006-01-24
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.53" h x .90" w x 5.85" l,
- Binding: Hardcover
- 256 pages
From Publishers Weekly
Beachy Head, a four-mile-long cliff on the south coast of England, is the third most popular suicide site in the world. According to Hunt, a Connecticut English teacher, more than 500 people have died there since 1965, most of them suicides . His brother-in-law, a schizophrenic, shot himself in the head, and Hunt, having read about Beachy Head in the Philadelphia Inquirer, decided to investigate the spot, visiting several times. Part memoir, part social history, this study attempts to analyze the mental state of a potential suicide within this geographical context. Writing with intelligence and sensitivity, Hunt describes the "sirenlike pull of the cliff edge," vividly conveying his own compulsion to plunge down. He interviews cab drivers who drove suicides to the site, police negotiators who prevented others from accomplishing their destructive goal and the team members who recover bodies from the cliffs. Hunt also speaks at length with relatives of several victims and relates the haunting chronicle of the Copper family, whose 24-year-old son leaped off the cliff after a thwarted love affair. What distinguishes this debut is both the accomplished prose and the author's refusal to judge men and women who decide to end their lives. (On sale Jan. 24)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
Advance praise for Cliffs of Despair
“Tom Hunt’s oddly specific focus on a single landscape of self-annihilation achieves a surprising universality: this is an elegy for everyone who has ever committed suicide, a book at once poignant, compassionate, kind, and mysterious, written with a winning combination of deep feeling and elegant restraint.”
–Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression
“A superb piece of the purest reportage, which is in consequence both captivating and fascinating–and which deals with its terrible subject in a manner that is careful, thoughtful, and kindly.”
–Simon Winchester, author of A Crack in the Edge of the World
“In this quirky, fascinating, strangely hypnotic book, Hunt explores the intersection of geography and psychology. Part travelogue, part memoir, part meditation, Cliffs of Despair is an original and provocative addition to the vast literature of suicide.”
–George Howe Colt, author of The Enigma of Suicide and The Big House
About the Author
Tom Hunt teaches English at a private boarding school in Kent, Connecticut. His essay “Cliffs of Despair” (the inspiration for this book) was cited as a notable work in The Best American Essays collection. He lives in Litchfield, Connecticut.
Most helpful customer reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
From Despair to Hope
By water girl
I'm rereading Cliffs of Despair, and am as awed by it now as when I first read the opening scene. It's a deeply moving and personal account of the author's attempt to understand more about a death in the family, his response to it, and about suicide itself. Having read months earlier about a popular suicide destination in England called Beachy Head, Hunt is driven to visit the place after his brother-in-law takes his own life at the age of twenty-one. His book reports in unflinching detail his conversations with police, cab drivers, members of the coastguard's rescue and recovery teams, and even a palm reader. Initially hesitant to articulate the reason for his visit, Hunt's sincerity and purity of purpose eventually earn him the trust and confidence of those most intimately acqainted with Beachy Head's allure. The result is a well-researched, sensitive, carefully written book that somehow avoids the risk of exploiting the lives and deaths it documents. I was touched and amazed by Hunt's compassion and integrity, his delicate use of humor, and by his willingness to reveal his own secrets along with those he discovers. I recommend this book to everyone, but especially to those who work or live with troubled adolescents, are interested in psychiatry, or who have been affected directly by suicide.
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
There's Nothing Like The Truth From A Superb Jouranlist
By Katherine Graham
This is one of the greatest books ever written about suicide, and even more so, about the redemptive power of knowledge from a spectacualar journalist who is telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but. Let's face it, no one likes to talk about it. But all ages, genders, from all walks of life often hit bottom with this alternative as seemingly their only way out. I cannot recall a more profoundly moving book that reaches into one's soul - and provides paradoxically a lifeline that one may need some day.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Compelling and Satisfying
By bookwoman
I haven't read a book so satisfying on so many levels in a long time. It's perceptive, beautifully written, informative, compassionate and even, in places, funny. I couldn't put it down. For six hours on a lazy Sunday afternoon, I was transported to the cliffs of Beachy Head and didn't want to leave.
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