God’s Waiting Room: Racial Reckoning at Life’s End is a poignant and immersive exploration of life in a South African nursing home, built atop a graveyard left behind by the forced removals of apartheid. Through the lens of Casey Golomski’s seven years of immersive research, the book offers a glimpse into the lives of the residents and caregivers of “Grace” nursing home. This institution, both a symbol of apartheid’s lingering scars and a microcosm of racial, social, and generational divides, becomes a space for exploring the tensions and reconciliations that emerge at the end of life.

At its core, the book confronts the painful history of apartheid, a system of racial segregation that displaced millions and dehumanized generations. As the older white residents and younger Black caregivers co-exist within Grace, they must navigate a complex dynamic born from decades of systemic violence. Golomski reveals, through vivid conversations and reflections, how these everyday interactions become moments of racial reckoning, tempered by the shared reality of aging and mortality.

What sets God’s Waiting Room apart is its narrative form. Golomski artfully combines creative nonfiction with ethnography, weaving together the past and present of his subjects’ lives in a single day-long tour of the home. Told in breathtakingly intimate and witty conversations with the home’s residents and nurses, including the untold story of Nelson Mandela’s Robben Island prison nurse, readers learn how ageism, sexism, and racism intersect and impact health care both in South Africa and in the United States, as well as create conditions in which people primed to be enemies find grace despite the odds. The stories of seven individuals highlight the tension between care and prejudice, survival and memory, as they reckon with the apartheid era’s haunting legacy.

Contemporary forms of living and dying in Swaziland cannot be understood apart from the global HIV/AIDS pandemic, according to anthropologist Casey Golomski. In Africa's last absolute monarchy, the story of 15 years of global collaboration in treatment and intervention is also one of ordinary people facing the work of caring for the sick and dying and burying the dead. Golomski's ethnography shows how AIDS posed challenging questions about the value of life, culture, and materiality to drive new forms and practices for funerals. Many of these forms and practicesnewly catered funeral feasts, an expanded market for life insurance, and the kingdom's first crematoriumare now conspicuous across the landscape and culturally disruptive in a highly traditionalist setting. This powerful and original account details how these new matters of death, dying, and funerals have become entrenched in peoples' everyday lives and become part of a quest to create dignity in the wake of a devastating epidemic.

Contemporary forms of living and dying in Swaziland cannot be understood apart from the global HIV/AIDS pandemic, according to anthropologist Casey Golomski. In Africa's last absolute monarchy, the story of 15 years of global collaboration in treatment and intervention is also one of ordinary people facing the work of caring for the sick and dying and burying the dead. Golomski's ethnography shows how AIDS posed challenging questions about the value of life, culture, and materiality to drive new forms and practices for funerals. Many of these forms and practicesnewly catered funeral feasts, an expanded market for life insurance, and the kingdom's first crematoriumare now conspicuous across the landscape and culturally disruptive in a highly traditionalist setting. This powerful and original account details how these new matters of death, dying, and funerals have become entrenched in peoples' everyday lives and become part of a quest to create dignity in the wake of a devastating epidemic.