A mass fatalities response goes far beyond returning the remains of a loved one to surviving family members. Those charged with this grim but critical responsibility will find themselves immersed in multiple tasks involving diverse individuals, organizations, and priorities. Mass Fatalities: Managing the Community Response examines multiple complex issues while providing practical guidance to communities and responders as they plan for, respond to, and recover from a mass fatalities incident. This book explores the immense array of tasks such as: Managing resources and personnel Protecting a potential crime scene Conducting a comprehensive search and recovery of the remains Identifying and returning the remains and personal effects Ensuring family members of the deceased are treated with compassion, dignity, and respect Making sure responders have the proper tools to complete their responsibilities Providing family members, responders, and the impacted community the necessary support to cope with the physical, spiritual, and emotional stressors of a mass fatalities incident The book explains in detail the functions performed at the mass fatalities operational sites, including the Disaster Site, Victim Identification Center, Family Assistance Center, and Staff Processing Center. It provides organizational charts with job descriptions detailing the roles and responsibilities for an effective leadership team and describes the management of the disaster site, presenting step-by-step procedures for search and recovery. The book also discusses the registration, initial interview, and Notification of Death for family members at the Family Assistance Center and covers best practices for the Victim Identification Center operations. Throughout, chapters emphasize the need for mental health services-exploring the essential elements of providing effective and compassionate support to surviving family members (including children), to responders and their families, and to the community. An increase in catastrophic disasters in recent years has highlighted the need for sound guidance outlining the protocol for handling these events. Mass Fatalities: Managing the Community Response is an indispensable resource for this formidable task. Peter Teahen discusses the book in a video on the CRC Press YouTube channel.

'Poignant and often hilarious' Publishers Weekly What if we responded to death... by throwing a party? By the time Erica Buist's father-in-law Chris was discovered, upstairs in his bed, his book resting on his chest, he had been dead for over a week. She searched for answers (the artery-clogging cheeses in his fridge?) and tried to reason with herself (does daughter-in-law even feature in the grief hierarchy?) and eventually landed on an inevitable, uncomfortable truth: everybody dies. With Mexico's Day of the Dead festivities as a starting point, Erica decided to confront death head-on by visiting seven death festivals around the world - one for every day they didn't find Chris. From Mexico to Nepal, Sicily, Thailand, Madagascar, Japan and finally Indonesia - with a stopover in New Orleans, where the dead outnumber the living ten to one - Erica searched for the answers to both fundamental and unexpected questions around death anxiety. This Party's Dead is the account of her journey to understand how other cultures deal with mortal terror, how they move past the knowledge that they're going to die in order to live happily day-to-day, how they celebrate rather than shy away from the topic of death - and how when this openness and acceptance are passed down through the generations, death suddenly doesn't seem so scary after all.

In response to increased academic interest in the fields of death studies, memorial studies, and human and animal studies, Skin, Meaning and Symbolism in Pet Memorials examines the mourning rituals which exist between people and their domestic pets. Paying close attention to the changing role and increased prominence of the companion animal in the domestic setting, each chapter considers a different form of companion animal memorialization, linking modern practices such as tattooing to historical examples of animal focused memento mori, particularly taxidermy. The final chapter adopts a forward focus in its provision of a framework for future studies related to how death and memorialization rituals are increasingly coming to occupy the digital space. While skin and touch are the focal points of many encounters explored in the text, what becomes evident is how the virtual realm is increasingly intruding into the touch experience. As a result, the posthumous, online afterlives of pets are set to become a social issue of increasing significance to the death and mourning experience. This work meets the needs of academics, post-graduate students and general readers alike, appealing to anyone with an interest in death studies, popular culture, tattooing and human and animal studies.

Since the rise in deaths through Covid-19, there has been an increase in the need for personal, heartfelt ceremonies to celebrate the end of life. More and more people are questioning traditional ideas and realising that there are choices out there. Drawing upon her years of experience in working in the funeral industry, Sarah Chapman uniquely collates all the key information needed into a single comprehensive resource. This must-have guide will holistically support you from the moment someone dies to their funeral, while also empowering you to plan your own end-of-life care and ceremony. This step-by-step guide will take away the fear and uncertainty you may feel when faced with arranging the funeral of a loved one. It gives you back control in creating a fitting ceremony to celebrate their life, while also providing you with the tools to plan your own funeral in a way that is unique to you. It will help you to decide on the legacy you would like to leave for future generations, and you may even decide to plan your own living ceremony before you die.

The elaborate and inventive slaughter of humans and animals in the arena fed an insatiable desire for violent spectacle among the Roman people. Donald G. Kyle combines the words of ancient authors with current scholarly research and cross-cultural perspectives, as he explores
* the origins and historical development of the games
* who the victims were and why they were chosen
* how the Romans disposed of the thousands of resulting corpses
* the complex religious and ritual aspects of institutionalised violence
* the particularly savage treatment given to defiant Christians.
This lively and original work provides compelling, sometimes controversial, perspectives on the bloody entertainments of ancient Rome, which continue to fascinate us to this day.

As read on BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week

'Moving, intellectual and unsentimental. I think it will become a classic' Melvyn Bragg

'Thoughtful, subtle, elegantly clever and oddly joyous, Every Third Thought is beautiful' - Kate Mosse

In 1995, at the age of forty-two, Robert McCrum suffered a dramatic and near-fatal stroke. Since that life-changing event, McCrum has lived in the shadow of death, unavoidably aware of his own mortality. And now, in his sixties, he is noticing a change: his friends are joining him there. Death has become his contemporaries’ every third thought.

And so, with the words of McCrum’s favourite authors as travel companions, Every Third Thought takes us on a journey towards death itself. This is a deeply personal book of reflection and conversation – with brain surgeons, psychologists, hospice workers and patients, writers and poets, and it confronts an existential question: in a world where we have learnt to live well at all costs, can we make peace with dying?

Breaking Free from Death examines how Russian writers respond to the burden of living with anxieties about their creative outputs, and, ultimately, about their own inevitable finitude. What contributes to creative death are not just crippling diseases that make man defenseless in the face of death, and not just the arguably universal fear of death but, equally important, the innumerable impositions on the part of various outsiders. Many conflicts in the lives of Rylkova's subjects arose not from their opposition to the existing political regimes but from their interactions with like-minded and supporting intellectuals, friends, and relatives. The book describes the lives and choices that concrete individuals and-by extrapolation-their literary characters must face in order to preserve their singularity and integrity while attempting to achieve fame, greatness, and success.

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.

Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Decides? looks at several of the most contentious issues in many societies. The book asks, whose rights are protected? How do these rights and protections change over time, and who makes those decisions? This book explores the fundamentally sociological processes which underlie the quest for morality and justice in human societies. The author sheds light on the social movements and social processes at the root of these seemingly personal moral questions. The third edition contains a new chapter on torture entitled, "Taking Life and Inflicting Suffering."

The unmarked mass graves left by war and acts of terror are lasting traces of violence in communities traumatized by fear, conflict, and unfinished mourning. Like silent testimonies to the wounds of history, these graves continue to inflict harm on communities and families that wish to bury or memorialize their lost kin. Changing political circumstances can reveal the location of mass graves or facilitate their exhumation, but the challenge of identifying and recovering the dead is only the beginning of a complex process that brings the rights and wishes of a bereaved society onto a transnational stage. Necropolitics: Mass Graves and Exhumations in the Age of Human Rights examines the political and social implications of this sensitive undertaking in specific local and national contexts. International forensic methods, local-level claims, national political developments, and transnational human rights discourse converge in detailed case studies from the United States, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Spain, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Greece, Rwanda, Cambodia, and Korea. Contributors analyze the role of exhumations in transitional justice from the steps of interviewing eyewitnesses and survivors to the painstaking forensic recovery and comparison of DNA profiles. This innovative volume demonstrates that contemporary exhumations are as much a source of personal, historical, and criminal evidence as instruments of redress for victims through legal accountability and memory politics. Contributors: Zoe Crossland, Francisco Ferrandiz, Luis Fondebrider, Iosif Kovras, Heonik Kwon, Isaias Rojas-Perez, Antonius C. G. M. Robben, Elena Lesley, Katerina Stefatos, Francesc Torres, Sarah Wagner, Richard Ashby Wilson.

Book & CD-ROM. International comparisons of mortality aimed at revealing age-specific and time-specific differences in survival between Denmark and nine developed countries have been carried out by estimating surfaces of ratios of death rates in the last decades. To gain deeper insights into this phenomenon comparative analyses of death rates by causes of death for Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Japan have been performed. The book is accompanied by a CD-ROM including colour Lexis maps, graphs of trends in death rates by causes of death, animated graphs of common survival indicators and a Lexis program for producing Lexis maps.

We live in a society where people struggle to look death in the eye. Death has become the territory of professionals and we rarely see a dead body, unless it is someone very close to us. Death has become hidden, and so more traumatic. This book shows that, if we start talking openly about death, it can change the way we live. It is a collection of stories and images about death, dying and bereavement. People from all walks of life share their experiences and what they have learned from accompanying others. Heartbreaking, angry, questioning and contradictory - laugh-aloud funny, even - the stories illuminate, inspire, reassure and inform. They are accompanied by commentaries from professionals working in end-of-life planning, health, bereavement and funeral care.

On June 8, 2010, while on a book tour for his bestselling memoir, "Hitch-22," Christopher Hitchens was stricken in his New York hotel room with excruciating pain in his chest and thorax. As he would later write in the first of a series of award-winning columns for Vanity Fair, he suddenly found himself being deported "from the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady." Over the next eighteen months, until his death in Houston on December 15, 2011, he wrote constantly and brilliantly on politics and culture, astonishing readers with his capacity for superior work even in extremis.
Throughout the course of his ordeal battling esophageal cancer, Hitchens adamantly and bravely refused the solace of religion, preferring to confront death with both eyes open. In this riveting account of his affliction, Hitchens poignantly describes the torments of illness, discusses its taboos, and explores how disease transforms experience and changes our relationship to the world around us. By turns personal and philosophical, Hitchens embraces the full panoply of human emotions as cancer invades his body and compels him to grapple with the enigma of death.
MORTALITY is the exemplary story of one man's refusal to cower in the face of the unknown, as well as a searching look at the human predicament. Crisp and vivid, veined throughout with penetrating intelligence, Hitchens's testament is a courageous and lucid work of literature, an affirmation of the dignity and worth of man.

As a result of its almost total displacement from the everyday life environment death threatens to become a target for the projection of various fears. This volume takes an interdisciplinary look at this complex phenomenon, and attempts to examine its various dimensions. The presentation of the possibilities of current palliative medicine and ethical reflection upon it are shown to be of particular importance.

This unique book recounts the experience of facing one's death solely from the dying person's point of view rather than from the perspective of caregivers, survivors, or rescuers. Such unmediated access challenges assumptions about the emotional and spiritual dimensions of dying, showing readers that -- along with suffering, loss, anger, sadness, and fear -- we can also feel courage, love, hope, reminiscence, transcendence, transformation, and even happiness as we die. A work that is at once psychological, sociological, and philosophical, this book brings together testimonies of those dying from terminal illness, old age, sudden injury or trauma, acts of war, and the consequences of natural disasters and terrorism. It also includes statements from individuals who are on death row, in death camps, or planning suicide. Each form of dying addressed highlights an important set of emotions and narratives that often eclipses stereotypical renderings of dying and reflects the numerous contexts in which this journey can occur outside of hospitals, nursing homes, and hospices.Chapters focus on common emotional themes linked to dying, expanding and challenging them through first-person accounts and analyses of relevant academic and clinical literature in psycho-oncology, palliative care, gerontology, military history, anthropology, sociology, cultural and religious studies, poetry, and fiction. The result is an all-encompassing investigation into an experience that will eventually include us all and is more surprising and profound than anyone can imagine.

If ever there was an area requiring that the research-practice gap be bridged, surely it occurs where thanatologists engage with people dealing with human mortality and loss. The field of thanatology the study of death and dying is a complex, multidisciplinary area that encompases the range of human experiences, emotions, expectations, and realities. The Handbook of Thanatology is the most authoritative volume in the field, providing a single source of up-to-date scholarship, research, and practice implications. The handbook is the recommended resource for preparation for the prestigious certificate in thanatology (CT) and fellow in thanatology (FT) credentials, which are administered and granted by ADEC."

Dying at the Margins: Reflections on Justice and Healing for Inner-City Poor gives voice to the most vulnerable and disempowered population-the urban dying poor- and connects them to the voices of leaders in end-of-life-care. Chapters written by these experts in the field discuss the issues that challenge patients and their loved ones, as well as offering insights into how to improve the quality of their lives. In an illuminating and timely follow up to Dancing with Broken Bones, all discussions revolve around the actual experiences of the patients previously documented, encouraging a greater understanding about the needs of the dying poor, advocating for them, and developing best practices in caring. Demystifying stereotypes that surround poverty, Moller illuminates how faith, remarkable optimism, and an unassailable spirit provide strength and courage to the dying poor.Dying at the Margins serves as a rallying call for not only end-of-life professionals, but compassionate individuals everywhere, to understand and respond to the needs of the especially vulnerable, yet inspiring, people who comprise the world of the inner city dying poor.

The Spirit Ambulance is a journey into decision-making at the end of life in Thailand, where families attempt to craft good deaths for their elders in the face of clashing ethical frameworks, from a rapidly developing universal medical system, to national and global human-rights politics, to contemporary movements in Buddhist metaphysics. Scott Stonington's gripping ethnography documents how Thai families attempt to pay back a "debt of life" to their elders through intensive medical care, followed by a medically assisted rush from the hospital to home to ensure a spiritually advantageous last breath. The result is a powerful exploration of the nature of death and the complexities arising from the globalization of biomedical expertise and ethics around the world.