Doughty chronicles [death] practices with tenderheartedness, a technician's fascination, and an unsentimental respect for grief.--Jill LeporeDoughty is a relentlessly curious and chipper tour guide to the underworld, and the weirder things get, the happier she seems.... Her dispatches from the dark side [are] doing us all a kindness--offering a picture of what we're in for, even if we'd rather not know.Thought-provoking.... Unless you and your friends are immortal, this book pertains to you.--A. J. JacobsDoughty writes bluntly about open-air cremations, natural burials and body composting, bringing a little more clarity and a little less mystery to the question: 'What happens to us after we die?'--Our Guide to 2017's Great Reads[T]he macabre travelogue is a thoughtful reflection and a smart critique of the American funeral industry, with plenty of gallows humor thrown in.--The Ten Best Travel Books of 2017It sounds a bit like Eat, Pray, Die, but her project is much larger than its premise first implies. She is searching not for personal spiritual enlightenment or the morbid titillation of thanatourism, but for practical, radical alternatives to our corporatized death industry. Her travels illuminate a host of compelling possibilities for better funerals and a less fraught relationship with our dead.Doughty finds the humanity in others cultures' relationship with death that seems to be lacking in ours.

Fascinated by our pervasive fear of dead bodies, mortician Caitlin Doughty embarked on a global expedition to discover how other cultures care for the dead. From Zoroastrian sky burials to wish-granting Bolivian skulls, she investigates the world?s funerary customs and expands our sense of what it means to treat the dead with dignity.Her account suggests that the rituals of the American funeral industry?especially chemical embalming?might be the most particular (and peculiar) of all, and that the most effective rituals are those that allow mourners to personally attend to the body of the deceased. Exquisitely illustrated by Landis Blair, From Here to Eternity is an adventure into the morbid unknown, a fascinating tour through the unique ways people everywhere confront mortality.