By Jessica Mitford

"Mitford's humorous and unforgiving e-book is the easiest souvenir mori we're prone to get.  It can be up-to-date and reissued every one decade for our non secular health."--The manhattan evaluate of Books

Only the scathing wit and looking out intelligence of Jessica Mitford may possibly flip an exposé of the yankee funeral right into a booklet that's immediately lethal critical and side-splittingly humorous. whilst first released in 1963 this landmark of investigative journalism turned a runaway bestseller and led to laws to guard grieving households from the unscrupulous revenues practices of these in "the dismal trade."

Just prior to her demise in 1996, Mitford completely revised and up to date her vintage learn. The American manner of dying Revisited confronts new traits, together with the good fortune of the profession's lobbyists in Washington, inflated cremation expenses, the telemarketing of pay-in-advance graves, and the consequences of monopolies in a death-care now ruled by way of multinational companies. With its hard-nosed shopper activism and a satiric imaginative and prescient out of Evelyn Waugh's novel The enjoyed One, The American manner of dying Revisited won't fail to notify, pride, and disturb.

"Brilliant--hilarious--A must-read for an individual making plans to throw a funeral of their lifetime."--New York Post

"Witty and penetrating--it speaks the truth."--The Washington Post

By Catharine Arnold

From Roman burial rites to the horrors of the plague, from the founding of the nice Victorian cemeteries to the improvement of cremation and the present procedure of metropolitan society in the direction of dying and bereavement—including newer tendencies to screens of collective grief and the cult of mourning, similar to that surrounding the demise of Diana, Princess of Wales—Necropolis: London and Its Dead deals a shiny historic narrative of this nice city's perspective to going the best way of all flesh.

As layer upon layer of London soil finds burials from pre-historic and medieval occasions, the town is printed as one monstrous grave, full of the is still of prior eras—pagan, Roman, medieval, Victorian. This attention-grabbing mixture of archaeology, structure and anecdote comprises such phenomena because the upward thrust of the project alternate and the pageantry of kingdom funerals; public executions and bodysnatching.

Ghoulishly wonderful and entire of attention-grabbing nuggets of knowledge, Necropolis leaves no gravestone unturned in its exploration of our altering attitudes to the deceased between us. either anecdotal historical past and cultural remark, Necropolis will take its position along classics of town corresponding to Peter Ackroyd’s London.

By Thomas Browne

Urn Burial, some of the most influential essays in Western literature, is now to be had as a brand new instructions Pearl. Hydriotaphia, or Urn Burial, is without doubt one of the pinnacles of Renaissance scholarship and absolutely one of many nice essays in English literature. starting with observations at the contemporary discovery of Roman antiquities within the kind of burial urns, Browne's associative brain wanders to elephant graveyards, to pre-Christian cremation ceremonies, and at last to the assumption of Christian burial. Browne then explores, with a extra melancholic meditation, man's struggles with mortality and the uncertainty of his destiny and reputation within the dwelling global. This version encompasses a magisterial discourse on Sir Thomas Browne taken from the 1st bankruptcy of W. G. Sebald's The jewelry of Saturn.

By Louis P. Pojman

This single-authored, short textual content explores the ethical dilemmas in our lives from a philosophical standpoint. Society is deeply divided at the issues of existence and dying mentioned during this booklet: the sanctity of lifestyles as opposed to the standard of lifestyles; the which means of dying and death; suicide; euthanasia; abortion; man made procreation reminiscent of in vitro fertilization and cloning; the demise penalty; animal rights; global starvation; and battle.

By Desmond Ball

By Satsuki Kawano

Based on large fieldwork, Nature’s Embrace finds the rising pluralization of dying rites in postindustrial Japan. Low beginning premiums and excessive numbers of individuals closing completely unmarried have resulted in a scarcity of ceremonial caregivers (most usually married sons and their other halves) to make sure the transformation of the lifeless into ancestors resting in peace. for this reason, older adults are more and more doubtful approximately who will practice memorial rites for them and continue their graves. during this examine, anthropologist Satsuki Kawano examines Japan’s altering dying rites from the viewpoint of these who choose to have their cremated is still scattered and have a good time their go back to nature.

For these with no young ones, ash scattering is an efficient technique, because it calls for neither a grave nor a caretaker. despite the fact that, the adoption of ash scattering isn't constrained to the childless. by means of forgoing graves and lightening the load on more youthful generations to take care of them, this new mortuary perform has given its proponents an elevated feel of keep an eye on over their posthumous lifestyles. by way of determining ash scattering, older adults contest their established prestige in eastern society, which more and more perspectives the elderly as passive care recipients. As such, this learn explores not just new advancements in mortuary practices, but in addition voices for elevated self-sufficiency in past due maturity and the elderly’s reshaping of ties with more youthful generations.

Nature’s Embrace deals insightful dialogue at the upward thrust of latest dying rites and ideologies, older adults’ perspectives in their loss of life rites, and Japan’s altering society in the course of the eyes of getting older urbanites. This e-book will have interaction quite a lot of readers drawn to loss of life and tradition, mortuary ritual, and adjustments in age kinfolk in postindustrial societies.

By Samuel Shem

As in all hospitals, the scientific hierarchy of the home of God was once a pyramid - much on the backside and one on the top.Put in a different way it used to be like an ice-cream cone...you needed to lick your means up! Roy Basch, the 'red-hot' Rhodes student, notion otherwise - yet then he hadn't met Hyper Hooper, out to win the main post-mortems of the yr award, nor Molly, the nurse with the crash helmet.He hadn't even met any of the Gomers ('Get Out of My Emergency Room!'), the no-hopers who desired to die yet who have been worthy extra alive!

By James M. Wilce

Development on ethnographic fieldwork and large ancient facts, Crying disgrace analyzes lament throughout hundreds of thousands of years and approximately each continent.Explores the iconic energy of lament: expressing grief via crying songs, usually in a collective ritual contextDraws at the author’s wide ethnographic fieldwork, and special long term engagement and participation within the phenomenonOffers a startling new point of view at the nature of modernity and postmodernityAn very important addition to turning out to be literature on cultural globalization

2012 AJN (American magazine of Nursing) e-book of the yr Award within the Hospice and Palliative Care category

Explores how spiritual understandings of demise are skilled in hospice care.

In the Sixties, English health care professional and devoted Christian Cicely Saunders brought a brand new means of treating the terminally unwell that she referred to as “hospice care.” Emphasizing a holistic and compassionate procedure, her version ended in the fast progress of a world hospice circulate. elements of the early hospice version that under pressure awareness to the non secular dimensions of loss of life and loss of life, whereas nonetheless famous and practiced, have constructed outdoor the purview of educational inquiry and attention. in the meantime, worldwide migration and multicultural diversification within the West have dramatically altered the profile of latest hospice care. according to those advancements, this quantity is the 1st to seriously discover how non secular understandings of demise are manifested and skilled in palliative care settings.

Contributors talk about how a “good death” is conceived in the significant spiritual traditions of Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, chinese language faith, and Aboriginal spirituality. various real-world examples are provided in case experiences of a Buddhist hospice heart in Thailand, Ugandan ways to death with HIV/AIDS, Punjabi extended-family hospice care, and pediatric palliative care. The paintings sheds new gentle at the value of non secular trust and perform on the finish of lifestyles, on the many varieties spiritual figuring out can take, and on the religious discomfort that so frequently accompanies the actual discomfort of the demise person.

“These … collage of Victoria–based students are to be counseled for supporting clinical and care employees triumph over common spiritual illiteracy.” — Vancouver Sun

“As the palliative care circulate has grown, it has are available in touch with all the world’s significant religions, which makes this a welcome book.” — overseas organization for Hospice & Palliative Care information

By Catherine Strong, Barbara Lebrun

The premature deaths of Amy Winehouse (2011) and Whitney Houston (2012), and the ’resurrection’ of Tupac Shakur for a functionality on the Coachella song pageant in April 2012, have concentrated the media highlight at the courting among well known song, reputation and dying. If the word ’sex, medicines and rock’n’roll’ ever certified a way of life, it has left many casualties in its wake, and with the ranks of useless musicians transforming into through the years, so the categories of loss of life concerned and the reactions to them have various. Conversely, as many artists who fronted the rock’n’roll revolution of the Fifties and Nineteen Sixties proceed to age, the assumption of demise younger and leaving a gorgeous corpse (which gave upward thrust, for example, to the parable of the ’27 Club’) not includes an identical resonance that it as soon as may need performed. This edited assortment explores the reception of lifeless rock stars, ’rock’ being taken within the widest experience because the artists mentioned belong to the genres of rock’n’roll (Elvis Presley), disco (Donna Summer), pop and pop-rock (Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Amy Winehouse), punk and post-punk (GG Allin, Ian Curtis), rap (Tupac Shakur), folks (the Dutchman André Hazes) and ’world’ tune (Fela Kuti). while tune artists die, their fellow musicians, manufacturers, fanatics and the media react another way, and this booklet brings jointly their intertwining modalities of reception. the industrial impression of dying on checklist revenues, copyrights, and print media is taken into account, and the several justifications by means of residing artists for being concerned with the lifeless, via covers, sampling and tributes. The cultural illustration of useless singers is investigated via obituaries, biographies and biopics, looking at that posthumous repute presents coping mechanisms for enthusiasts, and shoppers of pop culture extra in most cases, to house the information in their personal mortality. analyzing the contrasting ways that female and male lifeless singers are portrayed within the media.