The Whole Death Catalog

The Whole Death Catalog
Author: Harold Schechter
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2009-06-02
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0345512510

In the tradition of Mary Roach’s bestselling Stiff and Jessica Mitford’s classic exposé The American Way of Death comes this meticulously researched, refreshingly irreverent, and lavishly illustrated look at death from acclaimed author Harold Schechter. With his trademark fearlessness and bracing sense of humor, Schechter digs deep into a wealth of sources to unearth a treasure trove of surprising facts, amusing anecdotes, practical information, and timeless wisdom about that undiscovered country to which we will all one day travel. Topics include • Death anxiety–is your fear of death normal or off the scale? • You can’t take it with you . . . or can you? Wacky wills and bizarre bequests • The hospice experience–going out in comfort and style • Deathbed and funeral etiquette–how to help the dying and mourn the dead with dignity • Death on demand–why the right-to-die movement may be the next big thing • “Good-bye everybody”–famous last words • The embalmer’s art–all dressed up and nowhere to go • Behind the scenes at your local funeral home • Alternative burial choices–from coral reefs to outer space From the cold, hard facts of death to lessons in the art of dying well, from what happens in the body’s last living moments to what transpires in the ground or in the furnace, from near-death experiences to speculation on the afterlife, The Whole Death Catalog leaves no gravestone unturned.

Catalogue of Death

Catalogue of Death
Author: Jo Dereske
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2008-07-08
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0061734241

At last, construction begins on a new library for Bellehaven, a gift of Franklin Harrington, scion of old Bellehaven money, and one of the locally famous Harrington triplets. But when a freak snowstorm hits, Bellehaven is brought to its knees. Not so Miss Helma Zukas who is at her post, dispensing library information, overseeing wayward employees, and soothing a busload of stranded gamblers. Suddenly, an explosion rocks the snowy day, destroying the library site, killing the benefactor and a penny–pinching city finance czar. The snow melts but not trouble. Shockingly, Ms. Moon thrusts the new library project onto Helma. And Helma soon discovers why, uncovering secrets and shady dealings from start to finish – secrets in the library, in the City, and in the Harrington family – secrets worth killing for.

Documenting Death

Documenting Death
Author: Adrienne E. Strong
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2020-11-03
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0520973917

A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. Documenting Death is a gripping ethnographic account of the deaths of pregnant women in a hospital in a low-resource setting in Tanzania. Through an exploration of everyday ethics and care practices on a local maternity ward, anthropologist Adrienne E. Strong untangles the reasons Tanzania has achieved so little sustainable success in reducing maternal mortality rates, despite global development support. Growing administrative pressures to document good care serve to preclude good care in practice while placing frontline healthcare workers in moral and ethical peril. Maternal health emergencies expose the precarity of hospital social relations and accountability systems, which, together, continue to lead to the deaths of pregnant women.

Andrew Wyeth: Life and Death

Andrew Wyeth: Life and Death
Author: Tanya Sheehan
Publisher: Delmonico Books
Total Pages: 144
Release: 2022-05
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9781636810348

Presenting recently rediscovered drawings, Life and Death explores what it means for an artist to picture their own death, in both the context of Wyeth's late career and contemporary American art This volume presents for the first time a recently rediscovered series of pencil drawings from the early 1990s, through which Wyeth imagined his own funeral. Chapters by leading art historians explore the significance of picturing one's own death in both the context of Wyeth's late career and contemporary American art. The book connects the funeral series to Wyeth's decades-long engagement with death as an artistic subject in painting, his relationships with the models depicted, and his use of drawing as an expressive and exploratory medium. It further inserts Wyeth's work into a larger conversation about mortality and self-portraiture that developed in American art since the 1960s, and includes works by Duane Michals, Andy Warhol, David Wojnarowicz, George Tooker, Janaina Tschäpe and Mario Moore. While his contemporaries posed a variety of existential questions in picturing their own passing, those that interrogate the universality of death as a human experience have become especially urgent in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic and the national reckoning with racial inequality that emerged in 2020. Andrew Wyeth: Life and Death thus addresses ideas about loss, grief, vulnerability and (im)mortality that pervade the current moment. American painter Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009) lived his entire life in his birthplace of Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and his summer home in mid-coast Maine. His seven-decade career was spent painting the land and people that he knew and cared about. Renowned for his tempera painting Christina's World (1948), Wyeth navigated between artistic representation and abstraction in a highly personal way.

City of Death

City of Death
Author: Ephraim Mattos
Publisher: Center Street
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2018-10-23
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 154608181X

A frontline witness account of the deadly urban combat of the Battle of Mosul told by former Navy SEAL and frontline combat medic Ephraim Mattos. After leaving the US Navy SEAL teams in spring of 2017, Ephraim Mattos, age twenty-four, flew to Iraq to join a small group of volunteer humanitarians known as the Free Burma Rangers, who were working on the frontlines of the war on ISIS. Until being shot by ISIS on a suicidal rescue mission, Mattos witnessed unexplainable acts of courage and sacrifice by the Free Burma Rangers, who, while under heavy machine gun and mortar fire, assaulted across ISIS minefields, used themselves as human shields, and sprinted down ISIS-infested streets-all to retrieve wounded civilians. In City of Death: Humanitarian Warriors in the Battle of Mosul, Mattos recounts in vivid detail what he saw and felt while he and the other Free Burma Rangers evacuated the wounded, conducted rescue missions, and at times fought shoulder-to-shoulder with the Iraqi Army against ISIS. Filled with raw and emotional descriptions of what it's like to come face-to-face with death, this is the harrowing and uplifting true story of a small group of men who risked everything to save the lives of the Iraqi people and who followed the credence, "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." As the coauthor of the #1 New York Times bestselling American Sniper, Scott McEwen has teamed up with Mattos to help share an unforgettable tale of an American warrior turned humanitarian forced to fight his way into and out of a Hell on Earth created by ISIS.

Robert Capa: Death in the Making

Robert Capa: Death in the Making
Author: Robert Capa
Publisher: Damiani Limited
Total Pages: 112
Release: 2020-09-29
Genre: Photography
ISBN: 9788862087179

Once a cult-status rarity, Capa's classic, impassioned Spanish Civil War photobook is available again with new, high-quality image scans and supplementary research Robert Capa's Death in the Making was published in 1938 as a poignant tribute to the men and women, civilians and soldiers alike, fighting in Spain against Franco's fascist insurrection. The book included only one year of images from the Republican position, but covered the spectrum of emotions of a civil war, from the initial excitement to the more harrowing realities of modern warfare. But over time, after World War II and rising anti-communist paranoia in the United States, association with the Spanish Civil War was a liability and the book became obscured. Today, however, Death in the Making has reached cult status, not least because copies are hard to find (particularly ones with Capa's famous Falling Soldier image on the dust jacket). With new scans of all the images, this facsimile of the original edition reproduces the original layout by photographer André Kertész, the original caption text by Capa and preface by writer Jay Allen. The muddy 1938 publication is entirely transformed by high-quality printing to reflect the beauty and pathos of the original intention. This edition also includes a new essay with new research on the making and the reception of the original book, and a complete checklist identifying the author, location and date of each image. The most important new information is that Robert Capa and Gerda Taro are not the only photographers in the book, but also included was work by their good friend and colleague Chim, later known as David Seymour. Born Endre Erno Friedmann in Budapest, Robert Capa (1913-54) spent his early years moving from Hungary to Germany to France and Spain, first to dodge political strife and then to actively follow and document it. From 1936 to 1945 Capa photographed the Spanish Civil War, the Second Sino-Japanese War and World War II. In 1947, he founded the Magnum Photos agency with fellow photographers Henri Cartier-Bresson and David "Chim" Seymour, among others. Several years later, while documenting the First Indochina War, Capa died when he stepped on a landmine.

Book of the Dead

Book of the Dead
Author: Foy Scalf
Publisher: Oriental Institute Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2017
Genre: Book of the dead
ISBN: 9781614910381

Discover how the ancient Egyptians controlled their immortal destiny! This book, edited by Foy Scalf, explores what the Book of the Dead was believed to do, how it worked, how it was made, and what happened to it.

Four Last Things

Four Last Things
Author: Fr. Wade Menezes
Publisher: Sophia Institute Press
Total Pages: 129
Release: 2017
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1682780422

Few things in this earthly life are absolutely certain, but the most undebatable of these is death. Every person, even the atheist, will admit that death is certain. Death, however, is not the last event in this life of ours. Immediately after death, we shall be judged and then again on the Day of Judgment when all humanity will know us for what we are. Too often the reality of Heaven and salvation are highlighted at the expense of the Church's teachings on Death, Judgment, Purgatory, and Hell. Yet, these important doctrines of the Church hold the truths of salvation truths that can lead us to Heaven or can pull us away from it. In these pages, Fr. Wade Menezes, EWTN television host and Assistant General of the Fathers of Mercy, shows us that God has not called us to His wrath, but to salvation. He shows us that Heaven and Hell, salvation and damnation, eternal life and eternal punishment are all complementary doctrines. They need each other to be complete and we must understand the Church's teachings on all of these doctrines in order to have a balanced view of the world. Death, Judgment, Heaven and Hell these are the Four Last Things toward which we are moving each hour of the day and night. Read this book, and you'll have a firm grasp of one of the most important doctrines of Holy Mother Church that holds the truths of Heaven and our own salvation.

The Victorian Celebration of Death

The Victorian Celebration of Death
Author: James Stevens Curl
Publisher: Sutton Pub Limited
Total Pages: 330
Release: 2000
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780750938730

Professor Curl has fashioned an absorbing, lucid and entertaining book describing the Victorian response to the only certainty in life--death. It includes disposal of the dead, landscaped cemeteries funerals and more.