From Here to Eternity
- Author Caitlin Doughty, illustrated by Landis Blair
- Narrator Caitlin Doughty
- Publisher Orion
- Run Time 5 hours and 37 minutes
- Format Audio
- Genre Anthropology, Autobiography: science, technology and medicine, Human biology, Memoirs, Popular medicine and health, Sociology: death and dying, Travel writing.
Titles Purchased
- 1-5
- 6-10
- 11-15
- 16-20
- Over 20
Price p/Title
- £15.99
- £14.99
- £13.99
- £12.99
- £11.99
Listen to a sample
What to expect
With curiosity and morbid humour, Doughty introduces us to inspiring death-care innovators, participates in powerful death practices almost entirely unknown in the West and explores new spaces for mourning - including a futuristic glowing-Buddha columbarium in Japan, a candlelit Mexican cemetery, and America's only open-air pyre. In doing so she expands our sense of what it means to treat the dead with 'dignity' and reveals unexpected possibilities for our own death rituals.
Read by Caitlin Doughty
(p) 2017 Recorded Books LLC
Critics Review
-
Each chapter covers a culture with a highly distinctive and apparently ghastly approach to their dearly departed . . . Think Bill Bryson doing an underworld special. This humane book gently provokes you to wonder: what exactly is your ideal funeral?
THE TIMES -
Caitlin Doughty, joyful member of the death-positive movement, describes what happens to our mortal remains with relish . . . Jaunty, boisterous and unsentimental, Doughty believes that we in the West have made death and its aftermath into a corporate, perfunctory affair, in which the meaning of an ending is denied. Her mission is to ‘reclaim public understanding of dying’ and to bring individuality and joy back into our dealings with the dead
OBSERVER -
Compelling . . . Doughty’s writing will give you the giggles as well as send a chill down your spine
GUARDIAN -
From Here To Eternity is fascinating, thought-provoking and – who would have guessed? – sometimes funny. Put it on your bucket list
MAIL ON SUNDAY -
Doughty’s lively (and charmingly illustrated) cascade of anecdotes about how various cultures handle death spells out how contemporary Western fastidiousness about dead bodies is by no means universally shared. We are introduced to a variety of startling practices . . . and pervading the book is Doughty’s ferocious critique of the industrialisation of death and burial that is standard in the United States and spreading rapidly elsewhere. Doughty invites us to look at and contemplate alternatives . . . we have choices beyond the conventional; we can think about how we want our dead bodies to be treated as part of a natural physical cycle
NEW STATESMAN -
Doughty is fun, with an eye for the bizarre and the absurd. She hits the road in quest of cultures untroubled by the western taboos surrounding mortality
SPECTATOR
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