Best-selling author and licensed mortician Caitlin Doughty answers real questions from kids about death, dead bodies, and decomposition. Every day, funeral director Caitlin Doughty receives dozens of questions about death. This book blends her scientific understanding of the body and the intriguing history behind common misconceptions about corpses to offer factual, hilarious, and candid answers to thirty-five urgent questions posed by her youngest fans.

Kastenbaum was a renowned death scholar and professor and his seminal, comprehensive work on death encompasses perspectives from social and behavioral sciences, history, religion, philosophy, literature, and the arts.

This rich collection of original essays illuminates the causes and consequences of the South's defining experiences with death. Employing a wide range of perspectives, while concentrating on discrete episodes in the region's past, the authors explore topics from the seventeenth century to the present, from the death traps that emerged during colonization to the bloody backlash against emancipation and civil rights to recent canny efforts to commemorate - and capitalize on - the region's deadly past.

Medicine has triumphed in modern times, transforming birth, injury, and infectious disease from harrowing to manageable. But in the inevitable condition of aging and death, the goals of medicine seem too frequently to run counter to the interest of the human spirit. Nursing homes, preoccupied with safety, pin patients into railed beds and wheelchairs. Hospitals isolate the dying, checking for vital signs long after the goals of cure have become moot. Doctors, committed to extending life, continue to carry out devastating procedures that in the end extend suffering. Gawande, a practicing surgeon, addresses his profession's ultimate limitation, arguing that quality of life is the desired goal for patients and families. Gawande offers examples of freer, more socially fulfilling models for assisting the infirm and dependent elderly, and he explores the varieties of hospice care to demonstrate that a person's last weeks or months may be rich and dignified.

Provides comprehensive yet easily accessible and concise entries that offer insight into the expanding study of death, dying, and bereavement and contains more than 200 engaging entries from key thinkers and practitioners within the interdisciplinary field of death studies.

This resource addresses the traditional death and dying–related topics but also presents a unique focus on the human experience to create a new dimension to the study of death and dying. With more than 300 entries, the Encyclopedia of Death and the Human Experience includes the complex cultural beliefs and traditions and the institutionalized social rituals that surround dying and death, as well as the array of emotional responses relating to bereavement, grieving, and mourning.

This stimulating new book provides a sophisticated introduction to the key issues in the sociology of death and dying. Death and Dying will appeal to students across the social sciences, as well as professionals whose work brings them into contact with dying or bereaved people.

How do our ideas about dying influence the way we live? In this book Kastenbaum proposes a new way of understanding our last transition. A fresh exploration of the final passage through life and perhaps through death, his work deftly interweaves historical and contemporary experiences and reflections to demonstrate that we are always on our way.

This book covers all aspects - biological, medical, social, sociological, psychological, cultural, religious, philosophical - of death and dying. More than 400 entries cover AIDS, children, cremation, communication with the dead, grief and mourning across cultures, genocide, life-expectancy, widows, and much more. Also includes an appendix providing general overviews and contact information for nearly 80 organizations, 150 illustrations, and a comprehensive index.

The Complete Book of Death & Dying reminds us that almost no subject in the world elicits such universal fascination as death. Jones has masterfully collected information from diverse sources to explore, illuminate, demystify and enrich our understanding of the myriad issues related to death and dying.

Comprised of six sections that mirror the social trajectory of death: conceptualizations of death; death and dying; uncommon death; grief and mourning; mortuary rituals; and remembrance and regeneration.