This Is How We Die

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The definitive resource on perhaps the single most universal human concern: death. Even more relevant than when it was first published, this edition addresses contemporary issues in end-of-life care and includes an all-embracing and incisive afterword that examines the state of health care and our relationship with life as it approaches its terminus. How We Die also discusses how we can take control of our own final days and those of our loved ones. "Nuland's work acknowledges, with unmatched clarity, the harsh realities of how life departs… There is compassion, and often wisdom, in every page." —San Francisco Examiner

Discover newfound freedom in life’s ever-constant flow of endings and beginnings with the wise words of Pema Chödrön, beloved Buddhist nun and bestselling author of When Things Fall Apart As much as we might try to resist, endings happen in every moment—the end of a breath, the end of a day, the end of a relationship, and ultimately the end of life. And accompanying each ending is a beginning, though it may be unclear what the beginning holds. In How We Live Is How We Die, Pema Chödrön shares her wisdom for working with this flow of life—learning to live with ease, joy, and compassion through uncertainty, embracing new beginnings, and ultimately preparing for death with curiosity and openness rather than fear. Poignant for readers of all ages, her teachings on the bardos—a Tibetan term referring to a state of transition, including what happens between this life and the next—reveal their power and relevance at each moment of our lives. She also offers practical methods for transforming life’s most challenging emotions about change and uncertainty into a path of awakening and love. As she teaches, the more freedom we can find in our hearts and minds as we live this life, the more fearlessly we’ll be able to confront death and what lies beyond. In all, Pema provides readers with a master course in living life fully and compassionately in the shadow of death and change.

Dr. Sam Parnia faces death every day. Through his work as a critical-care doctor in a hospital emergency room, he became very interested in some of his patients’ accounts of the experiences that they had while clinically dead. He started to collect these stories and read all the latest research on the subject, and then he conducted his own experiments. That work has culminated in this extraordinary book, which picks up where Raymond Moody’s Life After Life left off. Written in a scientific, balanced, and engaging style, this is powerful and compelling reading. This fascinating and controversial book will change the way you look at death and dying.

We have lost the ability to deal with death. Most of our friends and beloved relations will die in a busy hospital in the care of strangers, doctors and nurses they have known at best for a couple of weeks. They may not even know they are dying, victims of the kindly lie that there is still hope. They are unlikely to see even their family doctor in their final hours, robbed of their dignity and fed through a tube after a long series of excessive and hopeless medical interventions. This is the starting point of Seamus O'Mahoney's thoughtful, moving and unforgettable book on the western way of death. Dying has never been more public, with celebrities writing detailed memoirs of their illness, but in private we have done our best to banish all thought of dying and made a good death increasingly difficult to achieve.

What happens to us as we die? Discover the answers in this exclusive 25th anniversary edition of Sherwin B Nuland’s seminal book With a foreword by Paul Kalanithi, bestselling author of When Breath Becomes Air. There are many books intended to help people deal with the trauma of bereavement, but few which explore the reality of death itself. Sherwin B. Nuland - with over thirty years' experience as a surgeon - explains in detail the processes which take place in the body and strips away many illusions about death. The result is a unique and compelling book, addressing the one final fact that all of us must confront. 'I don't know of any writer or scientist who has shown us the face of death as clearly, honestly and compassionately as Sherwin Nuland does here' James Gleick, author of Chaos

a motor-mouthed collage of spoken word and storytelling. tales of paranoia, young love and ultra-violence... from the desk of christopher brett bailey comes a spiralling odyssey of pitch-black humour and nightmarish prose. THIS IS HOW WE DIE is a prime slice of surrealist trash, an Americana death trip and a dizzying exorcism for a world convinced it is dying... ‘Is this actually how we die? Driven at disorientingly high speed through the blazing landscape of our own riot-torn hearts, while the radio blares adverts for impossible products conceived in the agonizing heat of capitalism’s terminal inferno? Christopher Brett Bailey auctions off everything we have and everything we think we know to the lowest bidder, leaving us stripped and spent and blissed out and beaten by language, that treacherous stuff we had thought was our friend. No, there ain’t no sanity clause: but I’d trust Bailey with my life, and if this is how we die, you know, it’s really not such a bad way to go.’ Chris Goode

In this touching narrative, young children ask, "Where do people go when they die?" Each child asks an adult that they trust--a father, a mother, a grandfather, an aunt, a teacher--and, although the reassuring answers they receive are all different, each leads back to the same simple truth: when people die, "They go to God. Who is everywhere." With an afterward and helpful suggestions about how to explain death to children, readers will find insight into one of the emotional issues we all struggle with.

A radical revaluation of how contemporary society perceives death—and an argument for how it can make us happy. “He who would teach men to die would teach them to live,” writes Montaigne in Essais, and in How to Die: A Book about Being Alive, Ray Robertson takes up the challenge. Though contemporary society avoids the subject and often values the mere continuation of existence over its quality, Robertson argues that the active and intentional consideration of death is neither morbid nor frivolous, but instead essential to our ability to fully value life. How to Die is both an absorbing excursion through some of Western literature’s most compelling works on the subject of death as well as an anecdote-driven argument for cultivating a better understanding of death in the belief that, if we do, we’ll know more about what it means to live a meaningful life.