With an aging population, declining marriage and childbirth rates, and a rise in single households, more Japanese are living and dying alone. Many dead are no longer buried in traditional ancestral graves where descendants would tend their spirits, and individuals are increasingly taking on mortuary preparation for themselves. In Being Dead Otherwise Anne Allison examines the emergence of new death practices in Japan as the old customs of mortuary care are coming undone. She outlines the proliferation of new industries, services, initiatives, and businesses that offer alternative means---ranging from automated graves, collective gravesites, and crematoria to one-stop mortuary complexes and robotic priests---for tending to the dead. These new burial and ritual practices provide alternatives to the long-standing traditions of burial and commemoration of the dead. In charting this shifting ecology of death, Allison outlines the potential of these solutions to radically reorient sociality in Japan in ways that will impact how we think about the end of life, identity, tradition, and culture in Japan and beyond.

Homeward Bound shows that as family structure becomes more complex, so too does elder care, and existing institutions and legal approaches are not prepared to handle those complexities. As 79 million American Baby Boomers approach old age, their diverse family structures mean the burden of care will fall on a different cast of family members than in the past. Our current approaches are based on an outdated caregiving model that presumes life-long connection between the parents and offspring, with the existence of high internal norm cohesion among family members providing a valuable safety net for caregiving. Single parent and remarried parent-led families are far more complicated, fragile, and point to the need for increased formal support from the religious, medical, legal, and public policy communities. We base our analysis on in-depth, qualitative interviews with surviving grown children and stepchildren whose mother, father, stepparent, or ex-stepparent died. Their stories illustrate the profound ways that the caregiving, mourning, and inheritance process has changed in ways not adequately reflected in formal legal, medical, and religious tools. The solutions center on awareness and preparation: providing more support for individual planning for incapacity and death and, even more importantly, creating legal, political, and social planning for the "graying of America" at a time of increasingly complex familial ties.

Five friends meet. Only four come home. On Christmas morning, DS Robin Butler has no plans to celebrate. He'll be glad to get back to work - a wish that comes true sooner than he anticipates. A dog walker at a local beach has discovered five unresponsive people strewn across the shingle. By the time Robin arrives, one is pronounced dead, and the other four are being treated in hospital. DC Freya West is less than pleased when the romantic day with her boyfriend is scuppered, but duty calls. As she and Butler speak to those involved, it's clear something is being left unsaid. They claim they are friends, and that they don't know how one of the group was killed. But why are they so cagey? A cold case investigation unlocks some answers about the history between the beach-going gang, yet they're tight-lipped about what prompted them to meet on Christmas Eve. Butler and West are getting nowhere, and their partnership is about to face another test. When Freya wants to come clean about events in her past, it's not just her neck on the line, but Robin's too. Can their relationship survive if their pact of silence is broken? The thrilling new instalment from policing's most dauntless duo. Perfect for fans of Cara Hunter, Jane Casey and Susie Steiner. Praise for Blink of an Eye 'A thrilling and unusual mystery, spiced with sadness, masterfully unspooling past secrets into present danger. Butler and West would make high quality Sunday night network television.' Dominic Nolan, author of Vine Street 'Butler and West are fast becoming my favourite detective partnership... Addictive reading!' Alison Belsham, author of The Tattoo Thief 'The untangling of the long-held web of lies from The Five was expertly done... the story telling seems so effortlessly easy, and before you know it, you're chapters in and can't stop.' Fliss Chester, author of A Dangerous Goodbye 'Blink of an Eye is a blindingly brilliant return to the Butler and West series, with a tight-knit and claustrophobic friendship group at the core of its mystery. The chemistry between detectives Freya and Robin is the absolute star of the show - the twists and turns of their partnership will leave you desperate for more. Cannot recommend this series enough!' Heather Critchlow 'I've just raced through Blink of an Eye and couldn't put it down. A Christmas Day body found on a beach, and a suspicious group of old friends... What's not to love! Tense, brilliant plotting and the perfect duo.' Rachael Blok, author of The Fall 'A punchy and pacy police procedural with heart.' Jo Furniss, author of All The Little Children 'One of the best detective series there is. Smooth, thrilling and full of emotion, this series of books are a must-read!' James Delargy, author of Vanished 'Great characters and a compelling mystery. Highly recommend.' Reader review 'Blink of an Eye, the fourth in Butler and West series, is one of the most intriguing British police procedurals published today.' Reader review 'A solid mystery with a tangled web at heart, perfectly crafted characters and a smart narrative. Both compelling and immersive.' Reader review 'So perfectly paced and boy do the jaw-dropping moments never cease. Superbly done.' Reader review

Fatal Years is the first systematic study of child mortality in the United States in the late nineteenth century. Exploiting newly discovered data from the 1900 Census of Population, Samuel Preston and Michael Haines present their findings in a volume that is not only a pioneering work of demography but also an accessible and moving historical narrative. Despite having a rich, well-fed, and highly literate population, the United States had exceptionally high child-mortality levels during this period: nearly one out of every five children died before the age of five. Preston and Haines challenge accepted opinion to show that losses in privileged social groups were as appalling as those among lower classes. Improvements came only with better knowledge about infectious diseases and greater public efforts to limit their spread. The authors look at a wide range of topics, including differences in mortality in urban versus rural areas and the differences in child mortality among various immigration groups. "Fatal Years is an extremely important contribution to our understanding of child mortality in the United States at the turn of the century. The new data and its analysis force everyone to reconsider previous work and statements about U.S. mortality in that period. The book will quickly become a standard in the field."--Maris A. Vinovskis, University of Michigan Originally published in 1991. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

THE NEW YORK TIMES AND SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER FROM THE AUTHOR OF THE ORGANIZED MIND 'Everyone we know needs this remarkable book ... Essential for the rest of your life' Daniel H. Pink, author of When and Drive' 'The secrets of ageing well ... a serious, evidence-based guide to what really works and why' Sunday Times ____________________________________________ We have long been encouraged to think of old age as synonymous with a decline in skills. Yet recent studies show that our decision making improves as we age, and our happiness levels peak in our eighties. What really happens to our brains as we get older? In The Changing Mind (published in America as Successful Aging), neuroscientist and internationally bestselling author Daniel Levitin invites us to dramatically shift our understanding of aging, demonstrating the many benefits of growing older. He draws on cutting-edge research to offer realistic guidelines and practical tips for readers to follow during every decade of life, showing us we all can learn from those who age joyously. Find out: -Why the story that older people don't need as many hours of sleep is a myth -What part environment, behaviour and luck play in how our brains age -How to increase the proportion of your life span spent in good health and decrease the time you spend sick -What you can do to maintain strength of body, mind and spirit whilst coping with the limitations of aging Combining science and storytelling, The Changing Mind is a radically new way to think about aging. 'Read this book. Wise, sensitive, and insightful' David Eagleman, author of The Brain 'A comprehensive and fascinating insight into the evolving human brain. This book could change your life' Professor Stephen Westaby, author of Fragile Lives

The author sheds new light on aspects of the beliefs, attitudes, and rituals surrounding death in ancient Greece from the Minoan and Mycenean period to the end of the classical age. She draws on different types of evidence - from literary texts to burial customs, inscriptions, and images in art - to explore the fragmentary and problematic evidence for the reconstruction of attitudes towards, and the beliefs and practices pertaining to death and the afterlife. The book is also a sophisticated critique of the methodologies appropriate for interpreting the evidence for ancient beliefs. Insights from athropology and other disciplines help to inform the reconstruction of these beliefs and to minimize the intrustion of culturally determined assumptions which reflect modern thinking rather than ancient realities.

The state has no greater power over its own citizens than that of killing them. This remarkable and disturbing history of capital punishment in Germany deals with the politics of the death penalty and the experience and cultural significance of executions. Richards Evans casts new light on the history of German attitudes to law, deviance, cruelty, suffering and death, illuminating many aspects of Germany's modern political development. He has made a formidable contribution not only to scholarship on German history but also to the social theory of punishment, and to the current debate on the death penalty.

A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. In rural China funerals are conducted locally, on village land by village elders. But in urban areas, people have neither land for burials nor elder relatives to conduct funerals. Chinese urbanization, which has increased drastically in recent decades, involves the creation of cemeteries, state-run funeral homes, and small private funerary businesses. The Funeral of Mr. Wang examines social change in urbanizing China through the lens of funerals, the funerary industry, and practices of memorialization. It analyzes changes in family life, patterns of urban sociality, transformations in economic relations, the politics of memorialization, and the echoes of these changes in beliefs about the dead and ghosts.

Popular pastor Randy Frazee answers perennial questions about life after death with an accessible exploration of what the Bible has to say on the subject. In both Christian and pop culture, there is a certain fascination with the afterlife. What happens after you die? What happens if you die with Christ or without Christ? What happens when Jesus returns if you have or haven't accepted Christ? What exactly comes next? Randy Frazee, popular pastor of Oak Hills Church and general editor of the wildly successful Believe and The Story programs, answers these questions and more. Born out of a deeply personal search for truth after the death of his mother, What Happens After You Die is a straightforward exploration of what the Bible says about life after death. From heaven and hell to the Lake of Fire and the actual presence of God, Frazee uncovers what is simply cultural tradition and what is truly biblical. He shows readers not only the death Jesus came to save us from but the life he came to save us for. Based on a teaching series that has had more online views than any other series Frazee has done to date, What Happens After You Die is a guide to the perennial questions about life and death, what comes next, and how we should live until then.

The death of Diana, Princess of Wales, was met by the deepest mourning of the twentieth century. Two and a half billion people worldwide watched the funeral on television, floral tributes flooded London's royal parks and sprung up, too, in small towns in Texas, conspiracy theories ricocheted around the Internet, commemorative stamps were issued in newly communist Hong Kong. Press coverage of the death was also unprecedented in both its scale and uniformity. Yet, in an enormous welter of schmaltz, very little was said about the meaning of what had occurred-whether Tony Blair's public emoting heralded a new kind of politics; what, if anything, the anguish of so many who never knew Diana in person revealed about modern society; how the intertwining of the ideas of celebrity and victim, physical beauty and moral worth, affected people's responses; what was implied for the future of the royal family. For those perplexed by the events surrounding Diana's death, this book provides some answers. Insisting that all aspects of the affair are open to investigation, that nothing (and especially not royalty) is sacred, it brings together a group of distinguished writers whose primary interest is to analyze the death rather than lament it. Contributors: Mark Auge, Jean Baudrillard, Sarah Benton, Homi K. Bhabha, Mark Cousins, Alexander Cockburn, Richard Coles, Regis Debray, Francoise Gaillard, Peter Ghosh, Christopher Hird, Christopher Hitchens, Linda Holt, Sara Maitland, Ross McKibbin, Mandy Merck, Tom Nairn, Glen Newey, Naomi Segal, Dorothy Thompson, Francis Wheen, Judith Williamson, and Elizabeth Wilson.

"Fatal Years" is the first systematic study of child mortality in the United States in the late nineteenth century. Exploiting newly discovered data from the 1900 Census of Population, Samuel Preston and Michael Haines present their findings in a volume that is not only a pioneering work of demography but also an accessible and moving historical narrative. Despite having a rich, well-fed, and highly literate population, the United States had exceptionally high child-mortality levels during this period: nearly one out of every five children died before the age of five. Preston and Haines challenge accepted opinion to show that losses in privileged social groups were as appalling as those among lower classes. Improvements came only with better knowledge about infectious diseases and greater public efforts to limit their spread. The authors look at a wide range of topics, including differences in mortality in urban versus rural areas and the differences in child mortality among various immigration groups. "Fatal Years is an extremely important contribution to our understanding of child mortality in the United States at the turn of the century. The new data and its analysis force everyone to reconsider previous work and statements about U.S. mortality in that period. The book will quickly become a standard in the field."--Maris A. Vinovskis, University of Michigan

Originally published in 1991.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Hospices have played a critical role in transforming ideas about death and dying. Viewing death as a natural event, hospices seek to enable people approaching mortality to live as fully and painlessly as possible. Award-winning medical historian Emily K. Abel provides insight into several important issues surrounding the growth of hospice care. Using a unique set of records, Prelude to Hospice expands our understanding of the history of U.S. hospices. Compiled largely by Florence Wald, the founder of the first U.S. hospice, the records provide a detailed account of her experiences studying and caring for dying people and their families in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Although Wald never published a report of her findings, she often presented her material informally. Like many others seeking to found new institutions, she believed she could garner support only by demonstrating that her facility would be superior in every respect to what currently existed. As a result, she generated inflated expectations about what a hospice could accomplish. Wald's records enable us to glimpse the complexities of the work of tending to dying people.

A gripping account of the Russian visionaries who are pursuing human immortality As long as we have known death, we have dreamed of life without end. In The Future of Immortality, Anya Bernstein explores the contemporary Russian communities of visionaries and utopians who are pressing at the very limits of the human. The Future of Immortality profiles a diverse cast of characters, from the owners of a small cryonics outfit to scientists inaugurating the field of biogerontology, from grassroots neurotech enthusiasts to believers in the Cosmist ideas of the Russian Orthodox thinker Nikolai Fedorov. Bernstein puts their debates and polemics in the context of a long history of immortalist thought in Russia, with global implications that reach to Silicon Valley and beyond. If aging is a curable disease, do we have a moral obligation to end the suffering it causes? Could immortality be the foundation of a truly liberated utopian society extending beyond the confines of the earth-something that Russians, historically, have pondered more than most? If life without end requires radical genetic modification or separating consciousness from our biological selves, how does that affect what it means to be human? As vividly written as any novel, The Future of Immortality is a fascinating account of techno-scientific and religious futurism-and the ways in which it hopes to transform our very being.

How digital technology--from Facebook tributes to QR codes on headstones--is changing our relationship to death.Facebook is the biggest cemetery in the world, with countless acres of cyberspace occupied by snapshots, videos, thoughts, and memories of people who have shared their last status updates. Modern society usually hides death from sight, as if it were a character flaw and not an ineluctable fact. But on Facebook and elsewhere on the internet, we can't avoid death; digital ghosts--electronic traces of the dead--appear at our click or touch. On the Internet at least, death has once again become a topic for public discourse. In Online Afterlives, Davide Sisto considers how digital technology is changing our relationship to death. Sisto describes the various modes of digital survival after biological death--including Facebook tributes, chatbots programmed to speak in the voice of a dead person, and QR codes on headstones--and discusses their philosophical ramifications. Sisto reports on such phenomena as the Tweet Hereafter, a website that collects people's last tweets; the intimacy of sending a WhatsApp message to someone who has died; and digital cremation, the deactivation of a dead person's account. Because we can mingle with the dead online almost as we mingle with the living, he warns, we may find it difficult to distinguish communication at a distance from communication with the dead. The digital afterlife has restored the communal dimension of death, rescuing both mourners and the mourned from social isolation. A society willing to engage with death and mortality, Sisto argues, is a more balanced and mature society.

The period following the death of a friend or loved one can be tumultuous for anyone, but can be especially difficult for children, with lasting effects if the loss is not acknowledged or supported. This book emphasises the importance of listening to children and helping them to create positive bonds that can sustain them as they go through their lives. It provides practical, creative approaches to support children in their time of bereavement and to those whose loved one is dying. By recognising feelings of pain, anger, and confusion through open and positive discussions, a child is able to build emotional resilience and create enduring memories of the person they have lost. The author explains the importance of developing continuing bonds between children and loved ones in times of bereavement and offers practical ways in which these bonds may be nurtured through creative activities, memory making, and personal storytelling.

Why is death bad for us, even on the assumption that it involves the absence of experience? Whom should we save from death if we cannot save everyone? Kamm considers these questions, critically examining some answers other philosophers have given. She also examines specifically what differences between persons are relevant to the distribution of any scarce resources, e.g. bodily organs for transplantation.