"A near-fatal health emergency leads to this powerful reflection on death--and what might follow--by the bestselling author of Tribe and The Perfect Storm. For years as an award-winning war reporter, Sebastian Junger traveled to many front lines and frequently put his life at risk. And yet the closest he ever came to death was the summer of 2020 while spending a quiet afternoon at the New England home he shared with his wife and two young children....

"Inspired by conversations with emigrants from Laos and Cambodia, Consoling Ghosts is a sustained contemplation of relationships with the dying and the dead. Jean M. Langford invites us to consider alternate ways of facing death, conducting relationships with the dead and dying, and addressing the effects of violence that continue to reverberate in bodies and social worlds"-- Publisher's Web site.

Examines some common myths about grieving, the importance of social supports, the impact of ethnic traditions regarding grief and the social costs of unresolved grieving.

From the publisher. Anthropologist Donald Joralemon asks whether America is really, as many scholars claim, a death-denying culture that prefers to quarantine the sick in hospitals and the elderly in nursing homes. His answer is a reasoned no. In his view, Americans are merely struggling to find cultural scripts for the exceptional conditions of dying that our social world and medical technologies have thrust upon us. The book: is written in the first-person...

While much has been written in recent years on death and dying, there has been little treatment of how people cope with death in the absence of religious belief, and virtually no examination of the potential political repercussions of a wider acceptance of mortality in American society. Alfred Killilea's strikingly original book revolves around a central irony: though the subject of death has been largely shunned in American culture lest it rob life...

How much loss can a nation bear? An America in which 620,000 men die at each other's hands in a war at home is almost inconceivable to us now, yet in 1861 American mothers proudly watched their sons, husbands, and fathers go off to war, knowing they would likely be killed. Today, the death of a soldier in Iraq can become headline news; during the Civil War, sometimes families did not learn of their loved ones' deaths until long after the fact. Did...

Michael K. Rosenow investigates working people's beliefs, rituals of dying, and the politics of death by honing in on three overarching questions: How did workers, their families, and their communities experience death? Did various identities of class, race, gender, and religion coalesce to form distinct cultures of death for working people? And how did people's attitudes toward death reflect notions of who mattered in U.S. society? Drawing from an...