Medicine has triumphed in modern times, transforming the dangers of childbirth, injury, and disease from harrowing to manageable. But when it comes to the inescapable realities of aging and death, what medicine can do often runs counter to what it sh... View details
Growing up, I never witnessed serious illness or the difficulties of old age. My parents, both doctors, were fit and healthy. They were immigrants from India, raising me and my sister in the small col...
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST
This inspiring, exquisitely observed memoir finds hope and beauty in the face of insurmountable odds as an idealistic young neurosurgeon attempts to answer the question What makes a life worth ... View details
PAUL DIED ON MONDAY, March 9, 2015, surrounded by his family, in a hospital bed roughly two hundred yards from the labor and delivery ward where our daughter, Cady, had entered the world eight months ...
A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK CRITICS' TOP 10 BOOK OF THE YEAR
"In its loving, fierce specificity, this book on how to die is also a blessedly saccharine-free guide for how to live" ( The New York Times ).
Former NEA fellow and Pushcart Prize-winning ... View details
Right now: imagine dying. Make it what you want. You could be in your bedroom, on a lonesome hill, or in a beautiful hotel. Whatever you want. What is the season? What time of day is it? Perhaps you w...
Written in Irv Yalom's inimitable story-telling style, Staring at the Sun is a profoundly encouraging approach to the universal issue of mortality. In this magisterial opus, capping a lifetime of work and personal experience, Dr. Yalom helps us recog... View details
Self-awareness is a supreme gift, a treasure as precious as life. This is what makes us human. But it comes with a costly price: the wound of mortality. Our existence is forever shadowed by the knowle...
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The Times 2012 Books of The Year... View details
The notorious stage theory of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, whereby one progresses from denial to rage through bargaining to depression and the eventual bliss of “acceptance,” hasn’t so far had much applicat...
The world-famous bestseller that brought new insight, hope and understanding to millions now available on CD!
Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross created her classic seminal work, On Death and Dying, to offer us a new perspective on the terminally ill. It is n... View details
Epidemics have taken a great toll of lives in past generations. Death in infancy and early childhood was frequent and there were few families who didn’t lose a member of the family at an early age. Me...
Fascinated by our pervasive fear of dead bodies, mortician Caitlin Doughty embarks on a global expedition to discover how other cultures care for the dead. From Zoroastrian sky burials to wish-granting Bolivian skulls, she investigates the world's fu... View details
Over the course of his 60 years, Christopher Hitchens has been a citizen of both the United States and the United Kingdom. He has been both a socialist opposed to the war in Vietnam and a supporter of the U.S. war against Islamic extremism in Iraq. H... View details
I OF COURSE do not believe that it is “Allah” who determines these things. (Salman Rushdie, commenting on my book god Is Not Great, remarked rather mordantly that the chief problem with its title was ...
Death is something we all confront-it touches our families, our homes, our hearts. And yet we have grown used to denying its existence, treating it as an enemy to be beaten back with medical advances.We are living at a unique point in human history. ... View details
Most of us, whether consciously or not, seek to collect and categorise information. In February 2009, a team led by psychologist Alfonso Caramazza of Harvard University examined brain response and fou...
Armed with a degree in medieval history and a flair for the macabre, Caitlin Doughty took a job at a crematory and turned morbid curiosity into her life's work. She cared for bodies of every color, shape, and affliction, and became an intrepid explor... View details
My second day at Westwind I met Padma. It wasn’t that Padma was gross. “Gross” is such a simple word, with simple connotations. Padma was more like a creature from a horror film, cast in the lead role...