What should medicine do when it can't save your life?
The modern healthcare system has become proficient at staving off death with aggressive interventions. And yet, eventually everyone dies—and although most Americans say they would prefer to die peacefully at home, more than half of all deaths take place in hospitals or health care facilities.
At the End of Life—the latest collaborative book project between the Creative Nonfiction Foundation and the Jewish Healthcare Foundation—tackles this conundrum head on. Featuring twenty-two compelling personal-medical narratives, the collection explores death, dying, and palliative care, and highlights current features, flaws, and advances in the healthcare system.
Here, a poet and former hospice worker reflects on death's mysteries; a son wanders the halls of his mother's nursing home, lost in the small absurdities of the place; a grief counselor struggles with losing his own grandfather; a medical intern traces the origins and meaning of time; a mother anguishes over her decision to turn off her daughter's life support and allow her organs to be harvested; and a nurse remembers many of her former patients.
These original, compelling personal narratives reveal the inner workings of hospitals, homes, and hospices where patients, their doctors and their loved ones all battle to hang on—and to let go.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1974 and the culmination of a lifes work, The Denial of Death is Ernest Beckers brilliant and impassioned answer to the why of human existence. In bold contrast to the predominant Freudian school of thought, Becker ta...
A sixth-generation funeral director and writer of the popular "must read" (Time magazine) blog Confessions of a Funeral Director reflects on mortality and the powerful lessons death holds for every one of us in this compassionate and thoughtful spi...
"Spiritually grounded, poetic, and brilliant . . . Puri has claimed her place in the ranks of illustrious physician-writers." --Katy Butler, author of Knocking on Heaven's DoorAs the American born daughter of immigrants, Dr. Sunita Puri knew from a ...
Ten years after Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s death: “An inspiring…guide to life, distilled from the experiences of people who face death” (Kirkus Reviews)—the beloved classic now with a new introduction and updated reso...
In Being Mortal, bestselling author Atul Gawande tackles the hardest challenge of his profession: how medicine can not only improve life but also the process of its ending Medicine has triumphed in modern times, transforming birth, injury, and infec...
Carla Valentine works with the dead. After studying forensics, she assisted pathologists with post-mortems for years before becoming the curator of the world's most famous pathology museum. When it comes to death, she truly is an expert, and in this...
In the tradition of Mary Roach's bestselling Stiff and Jessica Mitford's classic expose The American Way of Death comes this meticulously researched and refreshingly irreverent look at death from acclaimed author Harold Schechter. With his trademark...
Bestselling author of Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich explores how we are killing ourselves to live longer, not better.A razor-sharp polemic which offers an entirely new understanding of our bodies, ourselves, and our place in the universe, NA...
Die Wise does not offer seven steps for coping with death. It does not suggest ways to make dying easier. It pours no honey to make the medicine go down. Instead, with lyrical prose, deep wisdom, and stories from his two decades ...
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