Death Dying category: 510 books

Though it has often been passionately criticized--as fraudulent, exploitative, even pagan--the American funeral home has become nearly as inevitable as death itself, an institution firmly embedded in our culture. But how did the funeral home come to hold such a position? What is its history? And is...

Over Your Dead Body is a nonfiction book with a very personal narrative that reads like a novel.It takes in real life experiences, the science of death and caring for the dead, the after-death existence of pharoahs, kings and dictators, a recipe for medieval funeral cake, how 20,000 people in post-communist...

This book fills a critical gap in our scientific understanding of the grief response of parents who have lost a child to traumatic death and the psychotherapeutic strategies that best facilitate healing. It is based on the results of the largest study ever conducted of parents surviving a child's...

In this illuminating collection of oral-history style interviews, Casey Jarman talks to a funeral industry watchdog about the (often shady) history of the death trade; he hears how songwriter David Bazan lost his faith while trying to hold on to his family; he learns about cartoonist Art Spiegelman...

For millennia, the rituals of death and remembrance have been fixed by time and location, but in the twenty-first century, grieving has become a virtual phenomenon. Today, the dead live on through social media profiles, memorial websites, and saved voicemails that can be accessed at any time. This...

Someone dies. What happens next? One family inters their matriarch’s ashes on the floor of the ocean. Another holds a memorial weenie roast each year at a green-burial cemetery. An 1898 ad for embalming fluid promises, “You can make mummies with it!” while a leading contemporary burial...

Does bodily death mean the complete destruction of a person? The first part of this scholarly book defends the view that the nature of man and the world he encounters implies survival of death as a conceptual possibility. The second part considers the empirical evidence for concluding that at least...

FACE IT. WE CAN GO ANYTIME. BUT IN SO MANY DIFFERENT WAYS! Death becomes you, and it's just another fact of life explored in Cause of Death, a revealing abundance of startling data, false perceptions, bizarre fallacies, and some totally unexpected statistics about how, why, when, and where...

For those who don’t believe in an afterlife, the wisdom of the ages offers four great consolations for mortality: that death is benign and good; that mortal life provides its own kind of immortality; that true immortality would be awful; and that we experience the kinds of losses in life that we will...

   The fear of death, the pain of bereavement, the art of consolation, and the custom of mourning—these are experiences with which all mortals must reckon.  In The Grim Reader, editors Maura Spiegel and Richard Tristman have gathered the best classic and contemporary writing on mortality—from...

The Living and the Dead examines the boundaries between the worlds of life and death. The text draws upon philosophy, ethnography, literature and natural science to suggest that life and death are best understood not in opposition, but as continuous tendencies acting upon one another. Austin...

Mortuary Dialogues presents fresh perspectives on death and mourning across the Pacific Islands. Through a set of rich ethnographies, the book examines how funerals and death rituals give rise to discourse and debate about sustaining moral personhood and community amid modernity and its enormous transformations....

*Highly Commended in the Psychiatry category at the 2012 British Medical Association Book Awards* A near-death experience (NDE) is a phenomenon whereby powerful physical and emotional sensations and visions are experienced by someone who is either close to death or has been declared clinically dead....

In common with the rest of Britain's counties, Northamptonshire has a rich heritage of social history in its churches and churchyards. Dr Peter Hill's research into burial sites can seem somewhat morbid upon first glance, but he discovers a wealth of intriguing information about the lives,customs...