The American Way Of Death

Author : Jessica Mitford
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 320 pages
File Size : 51,7 Mb
Release : 2011-11-23
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780307809391

Get Book

The American Way of Death Revisited by Jessica Mitford Pdf

Only the scathing wit and searching intelligence of Jessica Mitford could turn an exposé of the American funeral industry into a book that is at once deadly serious and side-splittingly funny. When first published in 1963, this landmark of investigative journalism became a runaway bestseller and resulted in legislation to protect grieving families from the unscrupulous sales practices of those in "the dismal trade." Just before her death in 1996, Mitford thoroughly revised and updated her classic study. The American Way of Death Revisited confronts new trends, including the success of the profession's lobbyists in Washington, inflated cremation costs, the telemarketing of pay-in-advance graves, and the effects of monopolies in a death-care industry now dominated by multinational corporations. With its hard-nosed consumer activism and a satiric vision out of Evelyn Waugh's novel The Loved One, The American Way of Death Revisited will not fail to inform, delight, and disturb. "Brilliant--hilarious. . . . A must-read for anyone planning to throw a funeral in their lifetime."--New York Post "Witty and penetrating--it speaks the truth."--The Washington Post

Author : JESSICA MITFORD
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 128 pages
File Size : 42,6 Mb
Release : 2024-06-02
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 8210379456XXX

Get Book

The American Way of Death by JESSICA MITFORD Pdf

Author : Joshua Slocum,Lisa Carlson
Publisher : Upper Access Books
Page : 513 pages
File Size : 54,6 Mb
Release : 2011
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9780942679342

Get Book

Final Rights by Joshua Slocum,Lisa Carlson Pdf

Decades after Jessica Mitford stunned America with vivid accounts of corruption and abuse in the death industry, not much has improved. Families are manipulated into buying expensive goods and services they don't need or want. Prepaid funeral money vanishes into thin air. Body parts are sold on the black market. Eight states force families to pay a funeral director even if they conduct a home funeral with no need for help. But a consumer movement is no awakening, and Americans are asserting their rights over a key part of life, just as they did in the past with the natural childbirth and hospice movements. The two most prominent leaders of that movement are the authors of this book: Joshua Slocum, executive director of Funeral Consumers Alliance, and Lisa Carlson, executive director of Funeral Ethics Organization. Here they join forces to expose wrongdoing, inform consumers of their rights, and propose legal reforms. The book includes state-by-state summaries of laws, regulations, services, and consumer concerns.

Author : James J. Farrell
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 304 pages
File Size : 51,6 Mb
Release : 1980
Category : Social Science
ISBN : UOM:39015010158866

Get Book

Inventing the American Way of Death, 1830-1920 by James J. Farrell Pdf

This book is a study in religion, culture, and social change. Taking the position that death is a cultural event, James J. Farrell examines the historical roots of contemporary American attitudes toward and practices concerning death. Middle-class Victorians tried to assuage their fear by making death appear natural, painless, predictable, beautiful, and ultimately inconspicuous. Scientific naturalism was a crucial catalyst of this transformation. Naturalists redefined death, the medical profession called for the establishment of rural cemeteries, and the sanitary science movement influenced embalming methods and funeral practices. The main part of this work describes and analyzes the convergence of the intellectual and social trends that changed American beliefs and behavior concerning death. The penultimate chapter focuses on Vermilion County, and the development of funeral practices in that specific place. The author uses local sources to add an empirical dimension to the intellectual history that characterizes the rest of the book. -- From publisher's description.

Author : Drew Gilpin Faust
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 385 pages
File Size : 52,5 Mb
Release : 2009-01-06
Category : History
ISBN : 9780375703836

Get Book

This Republic of Suffering by Drew Gilpin Faust Pdf

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • An "extraordinary ... profoundly moving" history (The New York Times Book Review) of the American Civil War that reveals the ways that death on such a scale changed not only individual lives but the life of the nation. An estiated 750,000 soldiers lost their lives in the American Civil War. An equivalent proportion of today's population would be seven and a half million. In This Republic of Suffering, Drew Gilpin Faust describes how the survivors managed on a practical level and how a deeply religious culture struggled to reconcile the unprecedented carnage with its belief in a benevolent God. Throughout, the voices of soldiers and their families, of statesmen, generals, preachers, poets, surgeons, nurses, northerners and southerners come together to give us a vivid understanding of the Civil War's most fundamental and widely shared reality. With a new introduction by the author, and a new foreword by Mike Mullen, 17th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Author : Suzanne E. Smith
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 288 pages
File Size : 46,7 Mb
Release : 2010-02-25
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 0674036212

Get Book

To Serve the Living by Suzanne E. Smith Pdf

From antebellum slavery to the twenty-first century, African American funeral directors have orchestrated funerals or “homegoing” ceremonies with dignity and pageantry. As entrepreneurs in a largely segregated trade, they were among the few black individuals in any community who were economically independent and not beholden to the local white power structure. Most important, their financial freedom gave them the ability to support the struggle for civil rights and, indeed, to serve the living as well as bury the dead. During the Jim Crow era, black funeral directors relied on racial segregation to secure their foothold in America’s capitalist marketplace. With the dawning of the civil rights age, these entrepreneurs were drawn into the movement to integrate American society, but were also uncertain how racial integration would affect their business success. From the beginning, this tension between personal gain and community service shaped the history of African American funeral directing. For African Americans, death was never simply the end of life, and funerals were not just places to mourn. In the “hush harbors” of the slave quarters, African Americans first used funerals to bury their dead and to plan a path to freedom. Similarly, throughout the long—and often violent—struggle for racial equality in the twentieth century, funeral directors aided the cause by honoring the dead while supporting the living. To Serve the Living offers a fascinating history of how African American funeral directors have been integral to the fight for freedom.

Author : Eric Layer
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 258 pages
File Size : 47,7 Mb
Release : 2020-09-21
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 1735610925

Get Book

The Right Way of Death: Restoring the American Funeral Business to Its True Calling by Eric Layer Pdf

Funeral service is dying. Cremation rates are sky-high, new competitors pop up every day, and an entire generation of funeral home owners are considering closing shop. But a thriving future is still possible. Eric Layer paints a vivid picture of what's threatening death care and everything mortuary owners need to know about how to save it.

Author : Jessica Mitford
Publisher : Plume Books
Page : 336 pages
File Size : 45,7 Mb
Release : 1993
Category : Health & Fitness
ISBN : 0452270685

Get Book

The American Way of Birth by Jessica Mitford Pdf

Traces the history of childbirth in America and assesses the conventional and alternative methods of childbirth, commenting on the state of American childbirth and health care. By the author of The American Way of Death. Reprint. 50,000 first printing.

Author : Jessica Mitford
Publisher : Knopf
Page : 770 pages
File Size : 42,5 Mb
Release : 2010-05-19
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : 9780307565662

Get Book

Decca by Jessica Mitford Pdf

“Decca” Mitford lived a larger-than-life life: born into the British aristocracy—one of the famous (and sometimes infamous) Mitford sisters—she ran away to Spain during the Spanish Civil War with her cousin Esmond Romilly, Winston Churchill’s nephew, then came to America, became a tireless political activist and a member of the Communist Party, and embarked on a brilliant career as a memoirist and muckraking journalist (her funeral-industry exposé, The American Way of Death, became an instant classic). She was a celebrated wit, a charmer, and throughout her life a prolific and passionate writer of letters—now gathered here. Decca’s correspondence crackles with irreverent humor and mischief, and with acute insight into human behavior (and misbehavior) that attests to her generous experience of the worlds of politics, the arts, journalism, publishing, and high and low society. Here is correspondence with everyone from Katharine Graham and George Jackson, Betty Friedan, Miss Manners, Julie Andrews, Maya Angelou, Harry Truman, and Hillary Rodham Clinton to Decca’s sisters the Duchess of Devonshire and the novelist Nancy Mitford, her parents, her husbands, her children, and her grandchildren. In a profile of J.K. Rowling, The Daily Telegraph (UK), said, “Her favorite drink is gin and tonic, her least favorite food, trip. Her heroine is Jessica Mitford.”

Author : Katy Butler
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 368 pages
File Size : 48,9 Mb
Release : 2014-06-10
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781451641981

Get Book

Knocking on Heaven's Door by Katy Butler Pdf

Outlines a less invasive, more humane approach to end-of-life care, sharing the stories of the author's parents and explaining the political and technological factors that are interfering with patient preferences.

Author : Tracie McMillan
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 338 pages
File Size : 40,6 Mb
Release : 2012-02-21
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9781439171950

Get Book

The American Way of Eating by Tracie McMillan Pdf

A journalist traces her 2009 immersion into the national food system to explore how working-class Americans can afford to eat as they should, describing how she worked as a farm laborer, Wal-Mart grocery clerk, and Applebee's expediter while living within the means of each job.

Author : Ann Neumann
Publisher : Beacon Press
Page : 250 pages
File Size : 42,5 Mb
Release : 2017-02-07
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780807076996

Get Book

The Good Death by Ann Neumann Pdf

Following the death of her father, journalist and hospice volunteer Ann Neumann sets out to examine what it means to die well in the United States. When Ann Neumann’s father was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, she left her job and moved back to her hometown of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. She became his full-time caregiver—cooking, cleaning, and administering medications. When her father died, she was undone by the experience, by grief and the visceral quality of dying. Neumann struggled to put her life back in order and found herself haunted by a question: Was her father’s death a good death? The way we talk about dying and the way we actually die are two very different things, she discovered, and many of us are shielded from what death actually looks like. To gain a better understanding, Neumann became a hospice volunteer and set out to discover what a good death is today. She attended conferences, academic lectures, and grief sessions in church basements. She went to Montana to talk with the attorney who successfully argued for the legalization of aid in dying, and to Scranton, Pennsylvania, to listen to “pro-life” groups who believe the removal of feeding tubes from some patients is tantamount to murder. Above all, she listened to the stories of those who were close to death. What Neumann found is that death in contemporary America is much more complicated than we think. Medical technologies and increased life expectancies have changed the very definition of medical death. And although death is our common fate, it is also a divisive issue that we all experience differently. What constitutes a good death is unique to each of us, depending on our age, race, economic status, culture, and beliefs. What’s more, differing concepts of choice, autonomy, and consent make death a contested landscape, governed by social, medical, legal, and religious systems. In these pages, Neumann brings us intimate portraits of the nurses, patients, bishops, bioethicists, and activists who are shaping the way we die. The Good Death presents a fearless examination of how we approach death, and how those of us close to dying loved ones live in death’s wake.

Author : Lisa Takeuchi Cullen
Publisher : Harper Collins
Page : 242 pages
File Size : 47,7 Mb
Release : 2011-04-05
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780062030689

Get Book

Remember Me by Lisa Takeuchi Cullen Pdf

In Remember Me, Time writer Lisa Takeuchi Cullen has created a humorous and poignant chronicle of her travels around the country to discover how Americans are reinventing the rites of dying. What she learned is that people no longer want to take death lying down; instead, they're taking their demise into their own hands and planning the afterparty. Cullen hears stories of modern-day funerals: lobster-shaped caskets and other unconventional containers for corpses; cremated remains turned into diamonds; and even mishaps like dove releases gone horribly wrong. Eye-opening, funny, and unforgettable, Remember Me gives an account of the ways in which Americans are designing new occasions to mark death—by celebrating life.

Author : Kate Sweeney
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
Page : 232 pages
File Size : 44,8 Mb
Release : 2014-03-15
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780820346892

Get Book

American Afterlife by Kate Sweeney Pdf

An award-winning writer explores the patchwork American cultural history of grieving the departed. One family inters their matriarch’s ashes on the floor of the ocean. Another holds a memorial weenie roast each year at a green-burial cemetery. An 1898 ad for embalming fluid promises, “You can make mummies with it!” while a leading contemporary burial vault is touted as impervious to the elements. A grieving mother, 150 years ago, might spend her days tending a garden at her daughter’s grave. Today, she might tend the roadside memorial she erected where her daughter was killed. One mother wears a locket containing her daughter’s hair; the other, a necklace containing her ashes. What happens after someone dies depends on our personal stories and on where those stories fall in a larger tale―that of death in America. It’s a powerful tale that we usually keep hidden from our everyday lives until we have to face it. American Afterlife by Kate Sweeney reveals this world through a collective portrait of Americans past and present who are personally involved with death: obit writers in the desert, an Atlantic funeral voyage, a fourth-generation funeral director―even a midwestern museum that shows us our death-obsessed Victorian progenitors. Each story illuminates details in another, revealing a landscape that feels at once strange and familiar, one that’s by turns odd, tragic, poignant, and sometimes even funny. “Sweeney’s quest for the “why” behind mourning rituals has given us a book in the best tradition of narrative journalism.”—Jessica Handler, author of Braving the Fire: A Guide to Writing about Grief and Loss

Author : Shannon Lee Dawdy
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 272 pages
File Size : 46,7 Mb
Release : 2023-12-12
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780691254708

Get Book

American Afterlives by Shannon Lee Dawdy Pdf

A mesmerizing trip across America to investigate the changing face of death in contemporary life Death in the United States is undergoing a quiet revolution. You can have your body frozen, dissected, composted, dissolved, or tanned. Your family can incorporate your remains into jewelry, shotgun shells, paperweights, and artwork. Cremations have more than doubled, and DIY home funerals and green burials are on the rise. American Afterlives is Shannon Lee Dawdy’s lyrical and compassionate account of changing death practices in America as people face their own mortality and search for a different kind of afterlife. As an anthropologist and archaeologist, Dawdy knows that how a society treats its dead yields powerful clues about its beliefs and values. As someone who has experienced loss herself, she knows there is no way to tell this story without also reexamining her own views about death and dying. In this meditative and gently humorous book, Dawdy embarks on a transformative journey across the United States, talking to funeral directors, death-care entrepreneurs, designers, cemetery owners, death doulas, and ordinary people from all walks of life. What she discovers is that, by reinventing death, Americans are reworking their ideas about personhood, ritual, and connection across generations. She also confronts the seeming contradiction that American death is becoming at the same time more materialistic and more spiritual. Written in conjunction with a documentary film project, American Afterlives features images by cinematographer Daniel Zox that provide their own testament to our rapidly changing attitudes toward death and the afterlife.