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A review by sineadw9
From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death by Caitlin Doughty
emotional
informative
inspiring
reflective
fast-paced
4.0
Listened to the audiobook narrated by the author and it felt like a podcast - really quick listen that held my attention.
Doughty does a nice job observing death rituals from her lens as someone working in the American funeral industry. She avoids projecting onto the cultures she visits, but keeps a consistent comparative view between the people she meets and how her clients back home might react to these rituals/processes. Overall I really like how well she destigmatizes the biological, emotional, and spiritual elements of death and mourning. This book made me more comfortable with the inevitability of death, which is pretty cool. I hope I get to rot away in a forest when my time comes.
I wish it had tied up a little bit more at the end - the book is like a series of stories of different cultural processes around death, but I didn’t feel like they built to a bigger conclusion/synthesized message. Would still recommend if you’re curious to wade more into these topics!
Doughty does a nice job observing death rituals from her lens as someone working in the American funeral industry. She avoids projecting onto the cultures she visits, but keeps a consistent comparative view between the people she meets and how her clients back home might react to these rituals/processes. Overall I really like how well she destigmatizes the biological, emotional, and spiritual elements of death and mourning. This book made me more comfortable with the inevitability of death, which is pretty cool. I hope I get to rot away in a forest when my time comes.
I wish it had tied up a little bit more at the end - the book is like a series of stories of different cultural processes around death, but I didn’t feel like they built to a bigger conclusion/synthesized message. Would still recommend if you’re curious to wade more into these topics!