From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death

Books | Biography & Autobiography / Personal Memoirs

4.1

(905)

Caitlin Doughty

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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Author

Caitlin Doughty

Pages

288

Publisher

W. W. Norton & Company

Published Date

2017-10-03

ISBN

0393249905 9780393249903

Community ReviewsSee all

"Fascinating content, colorful descriptions, and a wry voice. Most rewarding is how thought provoking this book is on death and how it fits as a part of life-or rather, how it needs to be given its own space in order to fully appreciate life."

Ruby

"Cannot recommend this book highly enough"

Minnow

"Not bad, opened my eyes to how America has turned something so intimate like death into profit."

Max

"A beautiful, eye-opening look at death rituals and customs from cultures around the world presented in a entertaining informative way while still being dignified and respectful. "

Liz Hochhalter

"Poignant, touching, bizarre. "

Allison F

"One of my favorite reads under the theme of death."

Chelsia Rice

"A good book, especially for people who are interested in creepy/death things. I love Caitlin's Youtube channel, but there were a FEW points of contention I had which knocked this down a star. (1) She's supportive of would-be Islamic morticians who want to follow their no embalming tradition, but then later on critical of the Jewish and Islamic tradition of quick burial. It seems a bit hypocritical and ethnocentric considering that most of the book is praising traditional cultures for being different, but for those two very traditional practices she's against it since it doesn't fit with her point of view, even though those cultures have their own formal mourning process that's nothing like the corporate funeral industry in America. <br/>(2) The sections about the ñatitas took an usually roundabout way to describe where the skulls originated from. Honestly, when I hear that someone has a collection of human heads my first question is "whose heads are they?". Instead, she takes a long time to explain they aren't usually family members and then even later mentions that they can come from bodies of strangers who have been disinterred after 7 years. It's not clear what the process is for obtaining a stranger's head, but I'm guessing that rich people don't tend to end up as ñatitas. This could simply have been an oversight, but it was rather unsettling since it could easily have uncomfortable sociological underpinnings depending on the system."

L B

Leah Burns

"I'll take a sequel please and thank you."

Anna Farb

"This booked opened my eyes to how death can be beautiful and I find myself daydreaming about my own future funeral someday after enjoying this book "