Dying Words

The Last Word investigates the debased art of eulogy. Through insightful, surprisingly playful readings of famous eulogies (from a scene in Love Actually to Jacques Derrida’s heart-rending essays on the deaths of his peers), Cooper argues against the socially sanctioned desire to avoid thinking about death that results in clichéd memorials, honoring neither the living nor the dead.

Revised edition of the best-selling memoir that has been read by over a million people worldwide with translations in 29 languages. After too many years of unfulfilling work, Bronnie Ware began searching for a job with heart. Despite having no formal qualifications or previous experience in the field, she found herself working in palliative care. During the time she spent tending to those who were dying, Bronnie's life was transformed. Later, she wrote an Internet blog post, outlining the most common regrets that the people she had cared for had expressed. The post gained so much momentum that it was viewed by more than three million readers worldwide in its first year. At the request of many, Bronnie subsequently wrote a book, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, to share her story. Bronnie has had a colourful and diverse life. By applying the lessons of those nearing their death to her own life, she developed an understanding that it is possible for everyone, if we make the right choices, to die with peace of mind. In this revised edition of the best-selling memoir that has been read by over a million people worldwide, with translations in 29 languages, Bronnie expresses how significant these regrets are and how we can positively address these issues while we still have the time. The Top Five Regrets of the Dying gives hope for a better world. It is a courageous, life-changing book that will leave you feeling more compassionate and inspired to live the life you are truly here to live.

For the past eleven years, San Francisco Chronicle reporter Graydon Hubbell has been assigned to write obituaries, working in a corner of the newsroom known as Section Eight, long occupied by the paper's most cantankerous and often impolitic reporters. Initially, Hubbell regarded writing obituaries as a morbid and thoroughly distasteful assignment, but he now considers himself a master of the genre, as capable of writing a final salute to the rich and powerful as of composing a simple farewell for the eccentric and notorious. Then Hubbell learns he has cancer. He is determined to defy the disease and work at the paper for as long as he can, but as his career implodes through a series of increasingly absurd mishaps, confrontations and mistakes, the obituary writer must come to terms with the fact that his own life is coming to an end. Written with humor and pathos, Dying Words is a novel about mortality and remembrance, the story of an aging newspaper reporter less afraid of dying than of being forgotten.