This book explores death in contemporary society - or more precisely, in the 'spectacular age' - by moving beyond classic studies of death that emphasised the importance of the death taboo and death denial to examine how we now 'do' death. Unfolding the notion of 'spectacular death' as characteristic of our modern approach to death and dying, it considers the new mediation or mediatisation of death and dying; the commercialisation of death as a 'marketable commodity' used to sell products, advance artistic expression or provoke curiosity; the re-ritualisation of death and the growth of new ways of finding meaning through commemorating the dead; the revolution of palliative care; and the specialisation surrounding death, particularly in relation to scholarship. Presenting a range of case studies that shed light on this new understanding of death in contemporary culture, The Age of Spectacular Death will appeal to scholars of sociology, cultural and media studies, psychology and anthropology with interests in death and dying.

Ten years after Elisabeth Kubler-Ross's death, a commemorative edition with a new introduction and updated resources section of her beloved groundbreaking classic on the five stages of grief.
One of the most important psychological studies of the late twentieth century, "On Death and Dying" grew out of Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross's famous interdisciplinary seminar on death, life, and transition. In this remarkable book, Dr. Kubler-Ross first explored the now-famous five stages of death: denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Through sample interviews and conversations, she gives readers a better understanding of how imminent death affects the patient, the professionals who serve that patient, and the patient's family, bringing hope to all who are involved.
This edition includes an elegant, enlightening introduction by Dr. Ira Byock, a prominent palliative care physican and the author of "Dying Well."

In Sociology of Death and the American Indian, Gerry R. Cox examines dying, death, disposal, and bereavement as well describes these practices in various American Indian tribes both historically and currently, supplemented with oral histories from select tribes. The book focuses on what can be learned from the practices of traditional cultures, showing that understanding the ways of other cultures can enhance the understanding of one's own culture by comparing traditional and modern societies. Cox addresses that the centuries of injustices committed against American Indians have led to a neglect of learning about American Indian cultures and ways and attempts to fill the gaps in knowledge of American Indian dying, death, disposal, and bereavement practices.

Loving and grieving are two sides of the same coin: we cannot have one without risking the other. Only by understanding the nature and pattern of loving can we begin to understand the problems of grieving. Conversely, the loss of a loved person can teach us much about the nature of love.

Love and Loss, the result of a lifetime's work, has important implications for the study of attachment and bereavement. In this volume, Colin Murray Parkes reports his innovative research that enables us to bring together knowledge of childhood attachments and problems of bereavement, resulting in a new way of thinking about love, bereavement and other losses. Areas covered include:

• patterns of attachment and grief
• loss of a parent, child or spouse in adult life
• social isolation and support.

The book concludes by looking at disorders of attachment and considering bereavement in terms of its implications on love, loss, and change in a wider context.

Illuminating the structure and focus of thinking about love and loss, this book sheds light on a wide range of psychological issues. It will be essential reading for professionals working with bereavement, as well as graduate students of psychology, psychiatry, and sociology.

Based on a content analysis of writing assignments from a class on death and dying, this book focuses on the manner in which college students use religion to make sense of death and the dying process. Drawing on research spanning five years, the author considers the attitudes, concerns, and beliefs about death, exploring students' perspectives on the place of religion in end-of-life issues. With attention to questions related to death anxiety, suicide, mass homicide, and the death of young children, the author examines the ways in which students draw on religion to make sense of death, religion's function as both a source of comfort and empowerment and a source of distress, as well as the perceptions of those who resist religion. As such, Religion, Life, and Death will appeal to social scientists with interests in the sociology of young adults, and the sociology and psychology of religion, death, and dying.

Mortality remains a taboo topic in much of Western society, but death and violence continue to be staples of popular television. We can better understand the appeal of violence by investigating psychological theories surrounding anxiety about death and the defenses we use to manage that anxiety. This book examines five recent television series--Game of Thrones,The Punisher, Jessica Jones, Sons of Anarchy and Hannibal--and shows how fictional characters' motivations teach viewers about both the constructive and destructive ways we try to deal with our own mortality. Instead of dismissing violent television as harmless entertainment or completely condemning it as a dangerous trigger of hostile behavior, this book shows its effects on viewers in a more nuanced manner. It provides a new perspective on the enjoyment of violent television, enhancing fans' appreciation and sparking ongoing discussions about their value to both the individual and society.

- This book integrates compassionate-based approaches with current theories and practices in loss, grief, and bereavement to provide readers with new insights and understanding on supporting patients, families, and healthcare workers facing the many challenges associated with loss and grief. - This book provides a holistic overview on the theoretical foundations of compassion, with in-depth discussions on the essential components of compassion training, as well as practical examples on how compassionate-based approaches can be applied in situations of loss, grief, and bereavement. - This book consolidates and presents the most innovative and cutting-edge research, interventions, and techniques on compassionate-based approaches from international leaders in the field to offer diverse perspectives on the applications of compassion based approaches to a variety of settings relevant to loss and grief. -This book draws upon current practices in compassion that are readily applicable to both clinicians and their clients alike, helping to develop greater capacity and insight into the loss and grief that we experience in our lives.

- This book integrates compassionate-based approaches with current theories and practices in loss, grief, and bereavement to provide readers with new insights and understanding on supporting patients, families, and healthcare workers facing the many challenges associated with loss and grief. - This book provides a holistic overview on the theoretical foundations of compassion, with in-depth discussions on the essential components of compassion training, as well as practical examples on how compassionate-based approaches can be applied in situations of loss, grief, and bereavement. - This book consolidates and presents the most innovative and cutting-edge research, interventions, and techniques on compassionate-based approaches from international leaders in the field to offer diverse perspectives on the applications of compassion based approaches to a variety of settings relevant to loss and grief. -This book draws upon current practices in compassion that are readily applicable to both clinicians and their clients alike, helping to develop greater capacity and insight into the loss and grief that we experience in our lives.

In the 1890s, Amos Lunt served as the San Quentin hangman, tying the nooses that brought the most dangerous criminals in the Wild West to their deaths. A former police chief who became the hangman of San Quentin due to an unfortunate turn of events, Lunt stood on the gallows alongside bank robbers, desperadoes and assassins throughout a five-year career. This book follows Lunt's trail from the Santa Cruz police department to the San Quentin State Prison. Covering his interesting friendship with a series of death row inmates to the gradual deterioration of his sanity, it is a one-of-a-kind biography that profiles an American executioner. Also profiled are his subjects-twenty of the West's most heinous criminals-as well as Lunt's preparations for their hangings and their final moments on the gallows.

New Developments in the Bioarchaeology of Care evaluates, refines and expands existing concepts and practices in the developing field of bioarchaeological research into health-related care provision in the past. Evidence in human remains that indicates an individual survived with, or following, a serious pathology suggests this person most likely received some form of care from others. This observation was first made half a century ago, but it is only in the last five years that health-related caregiving has been accepted as a topic for bioarchaeology research. In this time, interest has grown exponentially. A focus on care provides a dynamic framework for examining the experiences of disease and disability in the past - at the level of the individual receiving care, and that of the community providing it. When caregiving can be identified in the archaeological record, bioarchaeologists may be able to offer unique insights into aspects of past lifeways. This volume represents the work of an international, diverse, cross-disciplinary group of contributors, each bringing their own particular focus, style and expertise to analyzing past health-related care. Nineteen chapters offer content that ranges from an introduction to the basic 'bioarchaeology of care' approach, through original case studies of care provision, to new theoretical perspectives in this emerging area of scholarship. This book creates a synergy that challenges our thinking about past health-related care behaviors and about the implications of these behaviors for understanding the social environment in which they took place.

Die fachliche und kulturelle Vielfalt der Praxis der Sozialen Arbeit und der Sozialpadagogik in Polen, Rumanien und Deutschland wird in diesem Tagungsband deutlich. Grundlagenthemen der Sozialen Arbeit, spezifische Ausbildungsaspekte, Aufsatze zum Themenfeld Gesundheit und Aufsatze zu spezifischen Praxisansatzen in der Sozialen Arbeit sind in diesem Band enthalten.

Through a detailed and fascinating exploration of changing medical knowledge and practice, this book provides a timeline of humankind's understanding of physiological death. Anchored in Early Modern Britain, it explains how evolving medical theories challenged the ambiguous definition of death, instigating anxieties over the newly realized potential for officials to mistake a person's time of death. Fears of premature burials were materialized as newspapers across Europe printed hundreds of articles about people who had been misdiagnosed as dead and were then buried-or nearly buried-alive. These stories have been tallied within this text to present the first contemporary statistic of how frequently misdiagnosed death led to premature burial during the eighteenth century. The public consciousness of premature burial manifested itself in many ways, including the necessity of having a wake before a funeral and the creation of safety coffins. This book also explores the folkloric phenomenon of the rising dead and the stories that inspired a number of authors including Coleridge, Byron and Stoker, who blended medical understanding with fiction to create vampire literature.

"Taken together, this volume is a welcome departure from the usual literature on memory and trauma which ignores what came before the war and treats what happened after only in relation to the Holocaust. This excellent volume enables us to look at the history of death as a whole beyond the break of 1945 and to see influences and continuities throughout the last century. The volume delivers on the promise of the introduction to open up new avenues for research and raise new questions and should be a welcome addition to the library of every scholar of modern Germany." . German Politics & Society " The volume] offers a significant contribution to theories of death and memory work in German Studies. It] is clearly organized using theme-based sections, which lead the reader through material culture as well as psychological investigation; the essays are well-researched and cogently written." . German Studies Review "Taken together, the volume provides more than the sum of its individual contributions and actually succeeds in offering new perspectives on a hitherto neglected topic. Several essays demonstrate persuasively the myriad ways in which the ghosts of the dead haunted the living in twentieth-century Germany...for anybody interested in the social and cultural history of death in Germany, this volume will be an indispensable starting point." . German History Recent years have witnessed growing scholarly interest in the history of death. Increasing academic attention toward death as a historical subject in its own right is very much linked to its pre-eminent place in 20th-century history, and Germany, predictably, occupies a special place in these inquiries. This collection of essays explores how German mourning changed over the 20th century in different contexts, with a particular view to how death was linked to larger issues of social order and cultural self-understanding. It contributes to a history of death in 20th-century Germany that does not begin and end with the Third Reich."

This book looks to existential thinkers for reasons to hope immortal life could be worth living. It injects new arguments and insights into the debate about the desirability of immortality, and tackles related issues such as boredom, personal identity, technological progress, and the meaning of life.

In this book Grace Jantzen constructs a Quaker spirituality of beauty as a theological-philosophical response to a world preoccupied with death and violence. Having mapped the foundations of western cultural violence in the Greco-Roman period and the Judea-Christian tradition in Foundations of Violence and Violence to Eternity, she now offers her alternative vision. This vision is an original and creative feminist reading of the Quaker tradition, considering George Fox and the writings of Quaker women, exploring the themes of inner light and beauty as alternatives to violence and the obstacles to building such an alternative world. After showing how seventeenth-century Quakers offered a different option for modernity, she maps the philosophical and ethical implications of engaging with the world through beauty and its transforming power. Written for everyone interested in contemporary spirtuality, it explains how Quaker ideas can provide a way to transform our violent world into one that celebrates life rather than death, peace rather than violence. This work is the second of two posthumous publications to complete Grace M. Jantzen's Death and the Displacement of Beauty collection, which began with Foundations of Violence (Routledge, 2004).

Ritualistic Crime, Criminals, and the Organizations behind the Sheath: A Book of Readings features carefully selected articles that help students better understand the causes, functions, and similarities of sacred forms of violence across the spectrum. Students learn about crimes committed by individuals or groups against another based on an errant belief that their acts will bring about a greater good. This information equips readers with the knowledge they need to identify and understand the classic signs of group affiliation. The anthology is divided into eight parts. The first part presents readers with an introduction to the volume and a discussion of the sacred power of violence in popular cultural. Parts II through IV focus on cults, sects, and religious crimes; millennial religions; domestic and international terrorist religions. Students read articles about Satanism, vampirism and the Goth movement, and syncretistic religions, Wicca, and neo-paganism. The final part speaks to new religious movements, including fiction-based religions and Scientology. Throughout, students are encouraged to consider how groups grow, flourish, and prosper, as well as the elements that either render them benign or violent. Providing students with a unique view into group behavior, Ritualistic Crime, Criminals, and the Organizations behind the Sheath is an ideal resource for courses in criminal justice, criminology, or law enforcement.

This book offers the first systematic study of death in the later novels of Don DeLillo. It focuses on Underworld to The Silence, along with his 1984 novel White Noise, in which the fear of death dominates the protagonists most hauntingly. The study covers eight novels, which mark the development of one of the most philosophical and prestigious novelists writing in English. Death, in its close relation to time, temporality and transience, has been an ongoing subject or motif in Don DeLillo's oeuvre. His later work is shot through with the cultural and sociopsychological symptoms and responses death elicits. His "reflection on dying" revolves around defensive mechanisms and destruction fantasies, immortalism and cryonics, covert and overt surrogates, consumerism and media, and the mortification of the body. His characters give themselves to mourning and are afflicted with psychosis, depression and the looming of emptiness. Yet writing about death also means facing the ambiguity and failing representability of "death." The book considers DeLillo's use of language in which temporality and something like "death" may become manifest. It deals with the transfiguration of time and death into art, with apocalypse as a central and recurring subject, and, as a kind of antithesis, epiphany. The study eventually proposes some reflections on the meaning of death in an age fully contingent on media and technology and dominated by financial capitalism and consumerism. Despite all the distractions, death remains a sinister presence, which has beset the minds not only of DeLillo's protagonists.

This sociological work examines the phenomenon of the Death Cafe, a regular gathering of strangers from all walks of life who engage in "death talk" over coffee, tea, and desserts. Using insightful theoretical frameworks, Fong explores the common themes that constitute a "death identity" and reveals how Cafe attendees are inspired to live in light of death because of death. Fong examines how the participants' embrace of self-sovereignty and confrontation of mortality revive their awareness of and appreciation for shared humanity. While divisive identity politics continue to foster neo-tribalisms and the construction of myriad "others," Fong makes visible how those who participate in Death Cafes end up building community while being inspired toward living more fulfilling lives. Through death talk unfettered from systemic control, they end up feeling more agency over their own lived lives as well as being more conscious of the possibility of a good death. According to Fong, participants in this phenomenon offer us a sublime way to confront the facticity of our own demise-by gathering as one.

Death And Anti-Death, Volume 6: Thirty Years After Kurt Gdel (1906-1978)[Charles Tandy, Ph.D., Editor] [ISBN 978-1-934297-03-2] ------Volume 6, as indicated by the anthology's subtitle, is in honor of Kurt Gdel (1906-1978). The chapters do not necessarily mention him. The chapters (by professional philosophers and other professional scholars) are directed to issues related to death, life extension, and anti-death, broadly construed. Most of the contributions consist of scholarship unique to this volume. As was the case with all previous volumes in the Death And Anti-Death Series By Ria University Press, the anthology includes an Index as well as an Abstracts section that serves as an extended table of contents. (Volume 6 also includes a BRIEF COMMUNICATIONS section.) The ten chapters are entitled as follows: ------> 1. Life And Death Economics: A Dialogue by Giorgio Baruchello and Valerio Lintner (pages 33-52) ------> 2. Charles Hartshorne by Daniel A. Dombrowski (pages 53-78) ------> 3. Choosing Death in Cases of Anorexia Nervosa - Should We Ever Let People Die From Anorexia? PART II by Simona Giordano (pages 79-100) ------> 4. The Ethics Of Enhancement by Bill Grote and William Grey (pages 101-126) ------> 5. Cosmology And Theology by John Leslie (pages 127-156) ------> 6. Positive Logicality: The Development Of Normative Reason by J. R. Lucas (pages 157-222) ------> 7. The Basic Ideas Of Conformal Cyclic Cosmology by Roger Penrose (pages 223-242) ------> 8. Deconstructing Deathism: Personal Immortality As A Desirable Outcome by R. Michael Perry (pages 243-264) ------> 9. What Mary Knows: Actual Mentality, Possible Paradigms, Imperative Tasks by Charles Tandy (pages 265-284) ------> 10. The Future Of Scientific Simulations: From Artificial Life To Artificial Cosmogenesis by Clment Vidal (pages 285-318)

This is a definitive study of films that have been built around the themes of love, death, and the afterlife-films about lovers who meet again (and love again) in heaven, via reincarnation, or through other kinds of after-death encounters. Far more than books about mere ghosts in the movies or religion in movies, Love in the Afterlife presents a complex but highly distinctive and unique pattern-the love-death-afterlife pattern-as it was handed down by the ancient Egyptians and Greeks (in the Isis and Orpheus myths, for example), developed by Freud and his followers in the duality of "Eros and Thanatos," and then featured in popular movies from the 1920s to the recent past. Among its other qualities, Love in the Afterlife may encourage readers to look at movies differently and reflect upon the possibility that other patterns in cinema may have gone undetected for years. Furthermore, this book will show how the love-death-afterlife theme found its way into all sorts of different film types: melodramas, comedies, war films, horror films, film noir, and other genres. The book will be well illustrated and quotations from film reviews will enliven its pages. A long appendix gives production data on almost sixty individual films.

Can we give Grandma a Viking funeral? Why don't animals dig up all the graves? Will my hair keep growing in my coffin after I'm buried? Every day, funeral director Caitlin Doughty receives dozens of questions about death. Here she offers her factual, hilarious and candid answers to thirty-five of the most interesting, sharing the lore and science of what happens to, and inside, our bodies after we die. Why do corpses groan? What causes bodies to turn strange colours during decomposition? and why do hair and nails appear longer after death? The answers are all within . . .

In Facing Cancer and the Fear of Death: A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Treatment, Dr. Norman Straker proposes that "death anxiety" is responsible for the American society's failure to address costly futile care at the end of life; more specifically, doctors default on the appropriate prescription of palliative care because of this anxiety. This leads to unnecessary suffering for terminally-ill patients and their families and significant distress for physicians. To address these challenges in the culture of medical education, increased psychological support for physicians who treat dying patients is necessary. Additionally, physicians need to reach a consensus regarding the discontinuation of active treatments. Psychoanalysts have traditionally denied the importance of death anxiety and report relatively few treatment cases of dying patients in their literature. This book offers multiple treatment reports by psychoanalysts that illustrate the effectiveness and value of a flexible approach to patients facing death. The psychoanalytic reader is expected to gain a greater level of comfort with facing death and is encouraged to consider making themselves more available to the ever-increasing population of cancer survivors. Further, psychoanalysts are encouraged to be more useful partners to the oncologists that are burdened by the irrational feelings of all parties.

The Restorative Nature of Ongoing Connections with the Deceased is a guide to stimulating thought and discussion about ongoing attachments between bereaved individuals and their deceased loved ones. Chapters promote broad, inclusive training and dialogue for working with clients who establish and/or maintain a restorative connection with their deceased loved one as well as those who find aspects of such connections to be psychologically or spiritually problematic or troublesome. Bereavement professionals will come away from this book with a better understanding and a deeper skillset for helping clients to develop continuing bonds.

Death studies is an established academic endeavour which is expanding globally into new disciplines Essential reference text for funerary activity in the region Standardised approach to structure and content ensures global coverage across the series