Keeping vigil over the dying is an essential human practice with long cultural traditions and profound psychological benefits. Yet, as legal scholar Louise Harmon shows, the institutions of modern life-from hospitals to courtrooms-intrude on the practice. In this humane and lyrical book, Harmon looks at literature, philosophy, history, and autobiography as she delicately probes the taboos around discussion of death. She asks whether the law can recognize the needs of families and loved ones and protect the space of their grieving.
Introducing one of the first primers on palliative and hospice care for the small animal veterinarian! Guest edited by Dr. Tami Shearer, this volume will include topics such as: the history of pet hospice, delivery systems of veterinary hospice and palliative care, 5-step pet hospice plan, a veterinarian’s role in helping pet owners with decision making, quality of life assessment techniques, assessment and treatment of pain in life-limiting disease, the role of rehabilitation techniques for hospice and palliative care patients, the role of nutrition and alternative care methods in hospice and palliative care patients, emotional support tips, ethical considerations in life-limiting conditions, case studies, and much more!
"If the dying body makes us flinch and look away, struggling not to see what we have seen, the lost body disappears from cultural view, buried along with the sensory traces of its corporeal presence."—from the Introduction American popular culture conducts a passionate love affair with the healthy, fit, preferably beautiful body, and in recent years theories of embodiment have assumed importance in various scholarly disciplines. But what of the dying or dead body? Why do we avert our gaze, speak of it only as absence? This thoughtful and beautifully written book—illustrated with photographs by Shellburne Thurber and other remarkable images—finds a place for the dying and lost body in the material, intellectual, and imaginary spaces of contemporary American culture. Laura E. Tanner focuses her keen attention on photographs of AIDS patients and abandoned living spaces; newspaper accounts of September 11; literary works by Don DeLillo, Donald Hall, Sharon Olds, Marilynne Robinson, and others; and material objects, including the AIDS Quilt. She analyzes the way in which these representations of the body reflect current cultural assumptions, revealing how Americans read, imagine, and view the dynamics of illness and loss. The disavowal of bodily dimensions of death and grief, she asserts, deepens rather than mitigates the isolation of the dying and the bereaved. Lost Bodies will speak to anyone imperiled by the threat of loss.
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 writer Sallie Tisdale offers a lyrical, thought-provoking, yet practical perspective on death and dying in Advice for Future Corpses (and Those Who Love Them). Informed by her many years working as a nurse, with more than a decade in palliative care, Tisdale provides a frank, direct, and compassionate meditation on the inevitable. From the sublime (the faint sound of Mozart as you take your last breath) to the ridiculous (lessons on how to close the sagging jaw of a corpse), Tisdale leads us through the peaks and troughs of death with a calm, wise, and humorous hand. Advice for Future Corpses is more than a how-to manual or a spiritual bible: it is a graceful compilation of honest and intimate anecdotes based on the deaths Tisdale has witnessed in her work and life, as well as stories from cultures, traditions, and literature around the world. Tisdale explores all the heartbreaking, beautiful, terrifying, confusing, absurd, and even joyful experiences that accompany the work of dying, including: A Good Death: What does it mean to die “a good death”? Can there be more than one kind of good death? What can I do to make my death, or the deaths of my loved ones, good? Communication: What to say and not to say, what to ask, and when, from the dying, loved ones, doctors, and more. Last Months, Weeks, Days, and Hours: What you might expect, physically and emotionally, including the limitations, freedoms, pain, and joy of this unique time. Bodies: What happens to a body after death? What options are available to me after my death, and how do I choose—and make sure my wishes are followed? Grief: “Grief is the story that must be told over and over...Grief is the breath after the last one.” Beautifully written and compulsively readable, Advice for Future Corpses offers the resources and reassurance that we all need for planning the ends of our lives, and is essential reading for future corpses everywhere. “Sallie Tisdale’s elegantly understated new book pretends to be a user’s guide when in fact it’s a profound meditation” (David Shields, bestselling author of Reality Hunger).
Has the mainstream media been careless in reporting on the issue of euthanasia? As the Right to Die and Physician Assisted Suicide movements gather steam, the national media have been too quick to perpetuate and focus on the medical and legal overtones of death. The ethical, religious, and philosophical dimensions of our increased acceptance of euthanizing the aged, infirm, and disabled are often neglected. Gailey argues that the press's failure to enrich public discourse may well erode its trustworthiness in the public's eye. Using abundant examples from analysis of elite, mainstream news publications, Gailey details how the national press systematically advanced pro-euthanasia views and interpretations, while marginalizing or omitting pro-life perspectives and frames. The battle over legalizing passive and active euthanasia has enormous social, economic, and ethical implications. An understanding of how the news media frame or package such issues for public consumption is critical. Gailey's integrative approach combines an exploration of the major historical, ideational, and economic factors leading to the rise of the Right to Die movement, and includes in-depth analysis of the media's framing of the controversy in the two decades Karen Ann Quinlan's coma in 1975 to Dr. Jack Kevorkian's 1999 conviction.
The first book to unpack American cinema's long history of representing death, this work considers movie sequences in which the process of dying becomes an exercise in legibility and exploration for the camera. Reading attractions-based cinema, narrative films, early sound cinema, and films using voiceover or images of medical technology, C. Scott Combs connects the slow or static process of dying to formal film innovation throughout the twentieth century. He looks at Thomas Edison's Electrocuting an Elephant (1903), D. W. Griffith's The Country Doctor (1909), John Ford's How Green Was My Valley (1941), Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950), Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby (2004), among other films, to argue against the notion that film cannot capture the end of life because it cannot stop moving forward. Instead, he shows how the end of dying occurs more than once and in more than one place, understanding death in cinema as constantly in flux, wedged between technological precision and embodied perception.
When seventeen-year-old Silas Umber's father disappears, Silas is sure it is connected to the powerful artifact he discovers, combined with his father's hidden hometown history, which compels Silas to pursue the path leading to his destiny and ultimately, to the discovery of his father, dead or alive.
After witnessing a gangland assassination, Jack Slade must escape the assassins wearing only swimming trunks, shirt, and sandals, with no money and no ID. Arriving in a strange town, he rescues a woman from rapists and goes to work in her gambling hall and whore house as a bouncer. He is recruited by a crime boss, and rises to be a top operative in the local underworld. Fists and bullets fly, however, when he revolts against his employer. Blood flows and dead bodies pile up as he cuts a red swathe through the criminal underworld.
In this Golden Age British-style mystery, Mystery Writers of America Grand Master John Dickson Carr presents Dr. Gideon Fell’s most chilling case, in which a clock-obsessed killer terrorizes London A clockmaker is puzzled by the theft of the hands of a monumental new timepiece he is preparing for a member of the nobility. That night, one of the stolen hands is found buried between a policeman’s shoulder blades, stopping his clock for all time. The crime is just peculiar enough to catch the attention of Dr. Gideon Fell, the portly detective whose formidable intellect is the terror of every criminal in London. Working closely with Scotland Yard, he finds that the case turns on the question of why the clock hands were stolen. And learning the answer will put Dr. Fell squarely in the path of a madman with nothing but time on his hands. Death-Watch is the 5th book in the Dr. Gideon Fell Mysteries, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.
