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From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death
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Published:
W. W. Norton & Company 2017
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Description

A New York Times and Los Angeles Times Bestseller



"Doughty chronicles [death] practices with tenderheartedness, a technician's fascination, and an unsentimental respect for grief." —Jill Lepore, The New Yorker


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 funerary customs and expands our sense of what it means to treat the dead with dignity. Her account questions the rituals of the American funeral industry—especially chemical embalming—and suggests that the most effective traditions are those that allow mourners to personally attend to the body of the deceased. Exquisitely illustrated by artist Landis Blair, From Here to Eternity is an adventure into the morbid unknown, a fascinating tour through the unique ways people everywhere confront mortality.

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Format:
Adobe EPUB eBook, Kindle Book, OverDrive Read
Street Date:
10/03/2017
Language:
English
ISBN:
9780393249903
ASIN:
B06XGH21J5
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Citations
APA Citation (style guide)

Caitlin Doughty. (2017). From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death. W. W. Norton & Company.

Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)

Caitlin Doughty. 2017. From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death. W. W. Norton & Company.

Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)

Caitlin Doughty, From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death. W. W. Norton & Company, 2017.

MLA Citation (style guide)

Caitlin Doughty. From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death. W. W. Norton & Company, 2017.

Note! Citation formats are based on standards as of July 2022. Citations contain only title, author, edition, publisher, and year published. Citations should be used as a guideline and should be double checked for accuracy.
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      • bioText: Caitlin Doughty is a mortician and the New York Times best-selling author of Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, From Here to Eternity, and Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? She is the creator of the web series Ask a Mortician, and the founder of The Order of the Good Death. She lives in Los Angeles, California, where she owns a funeral home.
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fullDescription

A New York Times and Los Angeles Times Bestseller

"Doughty chronicles [death] practices with tenderheartedness, a technician's fascination, and an unsentimental respect for grief." —Jill Lepore, The New Yorker

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 funerary customs and expands our sense of what it means to treat the dead with dignity. Her account questions the rituals of the American funeral industry—especially chemical embalming—and suggests that the most effective traditions are those that allow mourners to personally attend to the body of the deceased. Exquisitely illustrated by artist Landis Blair, From Here to Eternity is an adventure into the morbid unknown, a fascinating tour through the unique ways people everywhere confront mortality.

reviews
      • premium: False
      • source: New York Times Book Review
      • content: Doughty is a relentlessly curious and chipper tour guide to the underworld, and the weirder things get, the happier she seems.... Her dispatches from the dark side [are] doing us all a kindness—offering a picture of what we're in for, even if we'd rather not know.
      • premium: False
      • source: A. J. Jacobs
      • content: Thought-provoking.... Unless you and your friends are immortal, this book pertains to you.
      • premium: False
      • source: Dylan Thuras, co-founder of Atlas Obscura
      • content: Caitlin Doughty is razor sharp, and writes about death with exceptional clarity and style. From Here to Eternity manages to be both an extremely funny travelogue and a deeply moving book about what death means to us all.
      • premium: False
      • source: Smithsonian
      • content: The macabre travelogue is a thoughtful reflection and a smart critique of the American funeral industry, with plenty of gallows humor thrown in.
      • premium: False
      • source: Mail on Sundays
      • content: From Here To Eternity is fascinating, thought-provoking and—who would have guessed?—sometimes funny. Put it on your bucket list.
      • premium: False
      • source: New Republic
      • content: It sounds a bit like Eat, Pray, Die, but her project is much larger than its premise first implies. She is searching not for personal spiritual enlightenment or the morbid titillation of thana-tourism, but for practical, radical alternatives to our corporatized death industry. Her travels illuminate a host of compelling possibilities for better funerals and a less fraught relationship with our dead.
      • premium: True
      • source: Library Journal
      • content:

        May 1, 2017

        In Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, a New York Times best seller and LibraryReads top pick, mortician Doughty explains how she came to her job and why we should be more accepting of death. Here she considers how other countries approach life's end, chronicling the care of mummies in rural Indonesia and Bolivia's natitas, wish-granting human skulls that puff on cigarettes. Also discussed: new rituals in America such as green burial. Important concerns but also note that the book is pubbing a few weeks before Halloween.

        Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

      • premium: True
      • source: Kirkus
      • content:

        August 1, 2017
        In the follow-up to her well-received debut, Smoke Gets in your Eyes (2014), a mortician delivers a wide-eyed report on burial customs across the world.At the unique funeral parlor she owns and operates in Southern California, Doughty adopts a "younger, progressive" approach to burial protocol. Unwilling to accept the way that the necessity of "deathcare" has evolved into such a commercialized and bureaucratic industry, the inquisitive undertaker presents her globe-trotting experiences exploring and appreciating the eccentric and widely diverse death rituals across international cultures. In offering opposing perspectives that dignify, celebrate, and decorate the body in its expired state, Doughty hopes to do her part in spurring a reform of the funeral industry and to help change the squeamishness of Western attitudes toward death and the sanctity of the sacred burial. Her fascinating tour of rituals contains liturgies that readers will surely observe as rare, macabre, unbelievable, ancient, and precious--sometimes simultaneously. Among them: a Central American body thief validates why he confiscated his grandmother's body from a hospital; a cremation via community open-air pyre in Colorado (the only one of its kind in America), complete with flute and didgeridoo accompaniment; mummification restorations in Indonesia; and the glass encasement coffins of Barcelona: "Glass means transparency, unclouded confrontation with the brutal reality of death. Glass also means a solid barrier. It allows you to come close but never quite make contact." In Japan, where corpses were once perceived to be impure, now they are revered as beloved and their memorialization has been fully ritualized with the aid of technology and innovation. Green, eco-friendly "human composting" methods also have their place in the author's entertaining and thought-provoking narrative. Grimly enhanced by the artwork of Blair, these observances demonstrate how to diminish the stigma associated with death, burial, and eternal remembrance. Death gets the last word in this affably written, meticulously researched study of funerary customs.

        COPYRIGHT(2017) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

      • premium: True
      • source: Publisher's Weekly
      • content:

        Starred review from October 2, 2017
        Mortician Doughty (Smoke Gets in Your Eyes) catalogues rituals and cultural practices surrounding death from all over the world in this fantastic memoir, which is intended to “help us reclaim meaning and tradition in our own community.” Doughty, a mortician who doesn’t abide by typical American funeral protocols of embalming quickly and upselling products, relates practices—glass display cases in funeral homes in Barcelona, natural (casket-free) burials in Los Angeles, a mummified family member hanging out in an Indonesian living room for years before being buried— that will inspire readers to reconsider familiar rituals surrounding death. Doughty also explores the increasing corporatization of death and the growing popularity (and carbon footprint) of cremation. With humor and snappy descriptions, she also gleefully punches holes in Western misconceptions and prejudices concerning death rituals in other countries, as when a travel guide snubbed as a “ghoulish spectacle” the intricate, beautiful bamboo cages used in Bali for decomposition. Doughty’s skillful book will encourage debate on philosophical and moral preferences for posthumous care. Agent: Anna Sproul-Latimer, Ross Yoon.

      • premium: True
      • source: School Library Journal
      • content:

        January 1, 2018

        Doughty, founder of the Order of the Good Death, a nonprofit organization that advocates for natural burial and reducing the stigma around death, describes funereal rituals around the world while stopping to reflect on U.S. practices. In Indonesia, for instance, the Toraja keep the dead at home for several months or years until the funeral. The author also explores the North Carolina's FOREST facility, which composts corpses, and the Crestone End of Life, a Colorado nonprofit that performs open-air cremations. Doughty shares her reverence for the dead while poking fun at our fears ("gross as it sounds, I'd come back from the dead for a Diet Coke"). She forces U.S. readers to confront the secretive and profitable mortuary business and sheds light on cultures that celebrate death. If death is inevitable, she asks, why are we afraid to address it? As the Bolivians look to their natitas (special human skulls), we can look to them for a level of comfort and familiarity with death. "How would your ancestors deal with tragedy?" Probably not with a $10,000 check to take a dead body away. VERDICT Recommend this fascinating and well-written book to fans of Mary Roach's Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers.-Pamela Schembri, Horace Greeley High School, Chappaqua, NY

        Copyright 2018 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

      • premium: True
      • source: Library Journal
      • content:

        September 1, 2017

        In her first book, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, Doughty shared her experiences working in a crematory. Here, the author travels the world observing and researching rituals surrounding death in other cultures, bringing the lessons she learns home with her. She visits a technologically advanced columbarium in Japan, where robots retrieve a relative's urn with the scan of a keycard, and the only open-air pyre in the United States. In a remote region of Indonesia, she witnesses people tending their loved ones' mummified corpses, some of which are kept in family homes. In Spain, families spend time with the deceased, but only when the bodies are kept behind glass. Doughty views skulls that grant wishes in Bolivia, candlelit Mexican cemeteries on the Day of the Dead, and experiments with composting human bodies in North Carolina. She is the ideal guide on this journey, curious and respectful, eventually determining that as different as all of these experiences are, they're connected by the idea of "holding space" for loved ones-giving them time to mourn and a sense of purpose as they grieve. VERDICT Recommended for fans of the author and those with an interest in anthropology and ritual. [See Prepub Alert, 4/10/17.]--Stephanie Klose, Library Journal

        Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

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A New York Times and Los Angeles Times Bestseller

"Doughty chronicles [death] practices with tenderheartedness, a technician's fascination, and an unsentimental respect for grief." —Jill Lepore, The New Yorker

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 funerary customs and expands our sense of what it means to treat the dead with dignity. Her account questions the rituals of the American funeral industry—especially chemical embalming—and suggests that the most effective traditions are those that allow mourners to personally attend to the body of the deceased. Exquisitely illustrated by artist Landis Blair, From Here to Eternity is an adventure into the morbid unknown, a fascinating tour through the unique ways people...

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      • description: Social Science / Death & Dying
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      • description: Travel / Essays & Travelogues