Confronting The Good Death

Years before Hitler unleashed the “Final Solution” to annihilate European Jews, he began a lesser-known campaign to eradicate the mentally ill, which facilitated the gassing and lethal injection of as many as 270,000 people and set a precedent for the mass murder of civilians. In Confronting the “Good Death” Michael Bryant analyzes the U.S. government and West German judiciary’s attempt to punish the euthanasia killers after the war. The first author to address the impact of geopolitics on the courts’ representation of Nazi euthanasia, Bryant argues that international power relationships wreaked havoc on the prosecutions. Drawing on primary sources, this provocative investigation of the Nazi campaign against the mentally ill and the postwar quest for justice will interest general readers and provide critical information for scholars of Holocaust studies, legal history, and human rights. Support for this publication was generously provided by the Eugene M. Kayden Fund at the University of Colorado.

Following the death of her father, journalist and hospice volunteer Ann Neumann sets out to examine what it means to die well in the United States. When Ann Neumann’s father was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, she left her job and moved back to her hometown of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. She became his full-time caregiver—cooking, cleaning, and administering medications. When her father died, she was undone by the experience, by grief and the visceral quality of dying. Neumann struggled to put her life back in order and found herself haunted by a question: Was her father’s death a good death? The way we talk about dying and the way we actually die are two very different things, she discovered, and many of us are shielded from what death actually looks like. To gain a better understanding, Neumann became a hospice volunteer and set out to discover what a good death is today. She attended conferences, academic lectures, and grief sessions in church basements. She went to Montana to talk with the attorney who successfully argued for the legalization of aid in dying, and to Scranton, Pennsylvania, to listen to “pro-life” groups who believe the removal of feeding tubes from some patients is tantamount to murder. Above all, she listened to the stories of those who were close to death. What Neumann found is that death in contemporary America is much more complicated than we think. Medical technologies and increased life expectancies have changed the very definition of medical death. And although death is our common fate, it is also a divisive issue that we all experience differently. What constitutes a good death is unique to each of us, depending on our age, race, economic status, culture, and beliefs. What’s more, differing concepts of choice, autonomy, and consent make death a contested landscape, governed by social, medical, legal, and religious systems. In these pages, Neumann brings us intimate portraits of the nurses, patients, bishops, bioethicists, and activists who are shaping the way we die. The Good Death presents a fearless examination of how we approach death, and how those of us close to dying loved ones live in death’s wake.

"Confronting the Death Penalty probes how jurors make the ultimate decision about whether another human being should live or die. Drawing on ethnographic and qualitative linguistic methods, Robin Conley explores the means through which language helps to make death penalty decisions possible - how specific linguistic choices mediate and restrict jurors', attorneys', and judges' actions and experiences while serving and reflecting on capital trials."--Provided by publisher.

This books offers a philosophical exploration and assessment of the various ways in which human societies have confronted the question of death and mortality. In a very accessible style, the author considers religion's attempt to make sense of death, science's attempt to evade death, and philosophy's attempt to embrace death as a fundamental and defining moment of what it means to be human.

The world's most populous nation and soon-to-be largest economy is rapidly turning into the planet's most efficient assassin. Unscrupulous Chinese entrepreneurs are flooding world markets with lethal products. China's perverse form of capitalism combines illegal mercantilist and protectionist weapons to pick off American industries, job by job. China's emboldened military is racing towards head-on confrontation with the U.S. Meanwhile, America's executives, politicians, and even academics remain silent about the looming threat. Now, best-selling author and noted economist Peter Navarro meticulously exposes every form of "Death by China," drawing on the latest trends and events to show a relationship spiraling out of control. Death by China reveals how thousands of Chinese cyber dissidents are being imprisoned in "Google Gulags"; how Chinese hackers are escalating coordinated cyberattacks on U.S. defense and America's key businesses; how China's undervalued currency is damaging the U.S., Europe, and the global recovery; why American companies are discovering that the risks of operating in China are even worse than they imagined; how China is promoting nuclear proliferation in its pursuit of oil; and how the media distorts the China story--including a "Hall of Shame" of America's worst China apologists. This book doesn't just catalogue China's abuses: It presents a call to action and a survival guide for a critical juncture in America's history--and the world's. Publisher's note - in this book various quotes and viewpoints are attributed to a 'Ron Vara'. Ron Vara is not an actual person, but rather an alias created by Peter Navarro in order to present his views and opinions.

The national bestseller From the author of the bestselling More Beautiful Than Before comes an inspiring book about loss based on his most popular sermon. As the senior rabbi of one of the largest synagogues in the world, Steve Leder has learned over and over again the many ways death teaches us how to live and love more deeply by showing us not only what is gone but also the beauty of what remains. This inspiring and comforting book takes us on a journey through the experience of loss that is fundamental to everyone. Yet even after having sat beside thousands of deathbeds, Steve Leder the rabbi was not fully prepared for the loss of his own father. It was only then that Steve Leder the son truly learned how loss makes life beautiful by giving it meaning and touching us with love that we had not felt before. Enriched by Rabbi Leder's irreverence, vulnerability, and wicked sense of humor, this heartfelt narrative is filled with laughter and tears, the wisdom of millennia and modernity, and, most of all, an unfolding of the profound and simple truth that in loss we gain more than we ever imagined.

Having a good death is our final human right, argues Sandra Martin in this updated and expanded version of her bestselling and award-winning social history of the right to die movement in Canada and around the world. Winner of the BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction, finalist for both the Donner Prize in Public Policy and the Dafoe Prize for History, A Good Death has a new chapter on Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying Law. The law allows mentally competent adults, who are suffering grievously from incurable conditions, to ask for a doctor’s help in ending their lives. Does the law go far enough? No, says Martin. She delivers compelling stories about the patients the law ignores: people with life-crushing diseases who are condemned to suffer because their natural deaths are not reasonably foreseeable. With a clear analytical eye, she exposes the law’s shortcomings and outlines constitutional challenges, including the presumed right of publicly-funded faith-based institutions to deny suffering patients a legal medical service. Martin argues that Canada can set an example for the world if it can strike a balance between compassion for the suffering and protection of the vulnerable, between individual choice and social responsibility. A Good Death asks the tough question none of us can avoid: How do you want to die? The answer will change your life—and your death. “[An] excellent new book. . . .The timeliness is hard to overstate.” —The Globe and Mail “What truly distinguishes this book is the reportage on individuals and families who have fought to arrange for a better death. . . . These first-hand experiences are the beating heart of a timely and powerful examination.” —2017 BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction Jury Citation

The death of a student or staff member can devastate a school and its surrounding community. Confronting Death in the School Family will provide guidelines and tools for adding a tragedy component to your Crisis Response Team.

The Good Death is the first full-scale examination of one of today's most complex issues: the profound change in the way Americans think about and confront death. Drawing on more than six years of firsthand research and reporting, noted journalist Marilyn Webb builds her account around intimate portraits of the dying themselves. She explains why some deaths become shockingly difficult--and needlessly painful--and how the struggles over end-of-life decisions can pit patient and family against hospitals, doctors, insurance companies, religious groups, and the law. But there is good news as well. Webb describes many extraordinary programs and individuals who are changing the face of dying. An abundant source of comfort and hope, The Good Death shows how the essential elements of humane--even uplifted--death are available to all of us, if we know what is possible, where to go for help, and how to prepare.