How do doctors and nurses communicate with frightened patients who are dying, address the needs and concerns of the patients, and help the patients arrive at an acceptance of death? This work deals with the relationship that the health care team has with the dying and how well that team is prepared to address the fears of the dying. In addition, the health care team must learn to deal with their own emotions and ignorance concerning death. This work should be of interest to those professions that deal closely with dying people.

While health professionals may be adequately informed about the legal aspects of many specialized areas of medicine and nursing, they may not totally understand the law applicable to cases of dying patients, or even the legal definition of death itself. In the wake of advances in medical technology, recent court decisions on the right to die, the enactment of natural death and brain death statutes, advance directives and living wills, and growing use of organ transplantation, there has been widespread concern about the legal and ethical issues surrounding these subjects. This book, written by a lawyer-thanatologist, will satisfy these needs. It is the first work to bring together case and statutory law applicable to dying patients, the right to die, advance directives, brain death, and organ transplantation, thus formulating a law of dying and death.

It is also unique as a self-help law finder. Although occasions that require consultation with a lawyer will arise, this work gives health professionals practical guidance on where and how to find legal materials on these issues. This book should also prove immensely useful in summarizing the law concerning dying and death for professional legal counsel. Medical decisions and issues that once were the sole province of doctors, hospitals, patients, and families have become matters of increasing judicial and legislative attention.

None of the literature in the field of terminal care provides a full treatment of the laws, documents, and policies relating to the difficult issues arising at the end of life. When Life Ends was written to fill this gap by an attorney who serves on the bioethics committee of a large public hospital. It is an invaluable resource and practical tool for physicians, nurses, medical staffs, legal professionals, hospital administrators, and hospital bioethics committees because it provides: 1) in-depth legal commentaries on the refusal of life-sustaining treatment, advance directives, surrogate decision making, and the Patient Self-Determination Act; 2) more than 70 medical and legal documents to be used in connection with end of life decisions; and 3) hospital policies and procedures to suggest guidelines to hospital bioethics committees as they carry out their functions of developing policies and procedures to address end of life legal and ethical issues.

Erik Zukor is a soldier killed in World War II. Sarah, his grief-stricken wife, learns of a child who claims that he has memories of a previous life as Erik and that he is her husband reborn After skeptics dismiss the claim, Sarah turns to John Aldrich, the world's most famous authority on reincarnation, to confirm the validity of the child's story. Although dying, he agrees and, racing against time, must use all of his meticulous research methods and a special test to find out whether the child's claim is an elaborate hoax or an authentic case. Meanwhile Sarah becomes the prey of a hunter bent on her death. The roots of the situation are dark and tangled with lies, revenge, a hotly contested handwritten will, the paranormal and its skeptics and varied and complex characters. Then unexpected developments turn the case upside down. Readers will learn about reincarnation and India as they accompany Aldrich on his investigations of cases of children who have memories of previous lives. This is also a must-read story for readers who want to know how a claim of reincarnation is scientifically investigated. The author, co-editor of Reincarnation: Fact or Fable?, also is President of the Survival Research Foundation. Drawing on his thirty years of research and knowledge of reincarnation investigations, Berger's readable, highly informative and fascinating story is written with the thoroughness and thoughtfulness that characterized Berger's other books, such as Lives and Lives and Letters in American Parapsychology described as "superb" by Parapsychology Review and selected by Choice for its "outstanding academic list."

Life after death? This question concerns us all. But we simply do not know the right questions to ask about events and experiences presented to us as proof of life after death. We just don't know how to ap-proach this subject. Drawing on his experience as a leading survival researcher, Berger shows us what questions to ask and what alternative explanations we need to consider in order to make a balanced judgment. "Berger ...takes pains to show the whole range of laypersons' reports, from the very weak and ridiculous to the best classics in the literature. This is useful for the lay-reader, who needs to realize the degree to which misconceptions exist amid the well-intentioned reports, ...Berger's book serves a useful purpose." -- Karlis Osis, Ph.D. Research Director, American Society for Psychical Research. "this book is one to recommend...a valuable one ...as an introduction to the art of thinking critically about anomalous phenomena, it should serve many readers very well." --Emily Williams Cook, Ph.D., Division of Personality Studies, University of Virginia Health Sciences Center