Life In The Face Of Death

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • This inspiring, exquisitely observed memoir finds hope and beauty in the face of insurmountable odds as an idealistic young neurosurgeon attempts to answer the question What makes a life worth living? NAMED ONE OF PASTE’S BEST MEMOIRS OF THE DECADE • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • People • NPR • The Washington Post • Slate • Harper’s Bazaar • Time Out New York • Publishers Weekly • BookPage Finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award in Creative Nonfiction and the Books for a Better Life Award in Inspirational Memoir At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi’s transformation from a naïve medical student “possessed,” as he wrote, “by the question of what, given that all organisms die, makes a virtuous and meaningful life” into a neurosurgeon at Stanford working in the brain, the most critical place for human identity, and finally into a patient and new father confronting his own mortality. What makes life worth living in the face of death? What do you do when the future, no longer a ladder toward your goals in life, flattens out into a perpetual present? What does it mean to have a child, to nurture a new life as another fades away? These are some of the questions Kalanithi wrestles with in this profoundly moving, exquisitely observed memoir. Paul Kalanithi died in March 2015, while working on this book, yet his words live on as a guide and a gift to us all. “I began to realize that coming face to face with my own mortality, in a sense, had changed nothing and everything,” he wrote. “Seven words from Samuel Beckett began to repeat in my head: ‘I can’t go on. I’ll go on.’” When Breath Becomes Air is an unforgettable, life-affirming reflection on the challenge of facing death and on the relationship between doctor and patient, from a brilliant writer who became both.

This volume, written by eleven first-class scholars, brings into focus the Resurrection message of the New Testament. Much more than just biblical exposition, these essays demonstrate how the resurrection both provides the basis for joyful living now despite the shadow of death and undergirds the Christian belief in a future after death.

"Occasionally I read a book and say to myself that this is a book that I wished I had written. This is such a book! It is a delightful, practical, interesting, and inspiring book! Danai has written a soon-to-be classic in the field! Her writing is excellent! Her use of theories, concepts, history, and models are wonderful!"--Illness, Crisis and Loss "Danai PapadatouÖ[presents] an approach of Relational Care, care based on an understanding of relationships, that should be essential readingÖ.[S]he writes in an engaging and non-technical language, and manages to convey complex ideas in a manner that is accessible to all." --Colin Murray Parkes, OBE, MD, FRCPsych President, Cruse: Bereavement Care (From the Foreword) ì[A] wonderful contribution to the literature on caregiving and her well thought out ideas about relational caregiving are on the cutting edge. Congratulations.î -- Lynne Ann DeSpelder CoAuthor, The Last Dance: Encountering Death and Dying, 8th edition "This is no ordinary academic textbook. It is nothing short of a masterpiece in which Papadatou provides the field of death, dying and bereavement with invaluable and constructive insights into the world of caring for the dying and bereaved."--Grief Matters "This is a fascinating book, applying important theoretical modelsÖin order to describe and speculate about how professionals manage to work in an environment where suffering and grief are constantly present. This is an important and substantial addition to the mostly self-help literature about self-care for caregivers."--Doody's Medical Reviews In the Face of Death explores the experiences of health care professionals who care for the seriously ill, the dying, and the bereaved. In this book, Danai Papadatou offers a practical approach to caregiving, as well as a breadth and depth of insight into both the patient's and the caregiver's responses to death. The author discusses the issues and challenges health care professionals face when treating dying and bereaved patients. Topics include: compassion fatigue, the inevitability of suffering and the potential for growth, suffering in the workplace, team functioning in death situations, and team resilience. The main themes are: The Caring Relationship focuses on the relationship between the care provider and the person who is dying or grieving, and proposes a new, relationship-based model of care The Care Provider in Death Situations addresses the health professional's personal responses to death, using a model that illustrates the grieving process of the health professional The Team in the Face of Death provides recommendations for effective, interdisciplinary care services that support dying or bereaved patients as well as the health care provider

"Those who know me call me Old He, and they also know that I've worked in a crematorium for my entire life." Here begins Mu Cao's novel In the Face of Death We Are Equal, an unrelentingly realistic portrait of working-class gay men in the underbelly of Chinese society. He Donghai is days away from his sixtieth birthday and long-awaited retirement from his job as a corpse burner at a Beijing crematorium. As he approaches the momentous day, he reflects on his life and his relationship with a special group of young men who live and love on the margins of Chinese society. One of them is Ah Qing, a young migrant worker who leaves his village in Henan Province to earn a living in cities--and who has an unexpected personal connection to He. Through a disrupted and nonlinear narrative technique, and alternating between first, second, and third person, In the Face of Death We Are Equal tells the story of Ah and other young men like him. Sometimes enraging, often humorous, but always powerful, this novel explores the economic and sexual exploitation of young men and women from China's impoverished countryside who seek survival in the shadow of China's economic "miracle." Deftly translated by Scott E. Myers, it is the first title in Seagull's new Pride List, which showcases important queer writing from around the world. Written in Mu Cao's trademark earthy, sometimes graphic, idiom, In the Face of Death We Are Equal will be a valuable addition to queer and Chinese literature in translation.

The Art of Life and Death explores how the world appears to people who have an acute perspective on it: those who are close to death. Based on extensive ethnographic research, Andrew Irving brings to life the lived experiences, imaginative lifeworlds, and existential concerns of persons confronting their own mortality and non-being. Encompassing twenty years of working alongside persons living with HIV/AIDS in New York, Irving documents the radical but often unspoken and unvoiced transformations in perception, knowledge, and understanding that people experience in the face of death. By bringing an "experience-near" ethnographic focus to the streams of inner dialogue, imagination, and aesthetic expression that are central to the experience of illness and everyday life, this monograph offers a theoretical, ethnographic, and methodological contribution to the anthropology of time, finitude, and the human condition. With relevance well-beyond the disciplinary boundaries of anthropology, this book ultimately highlights the challenge of capturing the inner experience of human suffering and hope that affect us all--of the trauma of the threat of death and the surprise of continued life.

New York Times Bestseller Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize Winner of the J. Anthony Lukas Award "Nimbly splices together history, science, reporting and personal experiences into a taut and cautiously hopeful narrative.… Egan’s book is bursting with life (and yes, death)." —Robert Moor, New York Times Book Review The Great Lakes—Erie, Huron, Michigan, Ontario, and Superior—hold 20 percent of the world’s supply of surface fresh water and provide sustenance, work, and recreation for tens of millions of Americans. But they are under threat as never before, and their problems are spreading across the continent. The Death and Life of the Great Lakes is prize-winning reporter Dan Egan’s compulsively readable portrait of an ecological catastrophe happening right before our eyes, blending the epic story of the lakes with an examination of the perils they face and the ways we can restore and preserve them for generations to come.

Keith Haring is synonymous with the downtown New York art scene of the 1980's. His artwork-with its simple, bold lines and dynamic figures in motion-filtered in to the world's consciousness and is still instantly recognizable, twenty years after his death. This Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition features ninety black-and-white images of classic artwork and never-before-published Polaroid images, and is a remarkable glimpse of a man who, in his quest to become an artist, instead became an icon. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Whereas Western society views death as the last taboo, the Tibetan tradition incorporates meditation on death into everyday life. Tibetan Buddhists believe that a conscious awareness of one's own impermanence allows a person to live a happy, fulfilled life. Over the centuries, the Tibetans have developed a wide-ranging literature on death, including inspirational poetry and prose, prayers, and practical works on caring for the dying. This fascinating book presents nine short Tibetan texts. Important writings by the Second, Seventh, and Thirteenth Dalai Lamas and by Karma Lingpa, author of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, are included. It covers topics such as meditation techniques to prepare for death, inspirational accounts of the deaths of saints and yogis, and methods for training the mind in the transference of consciousness at the time of death.