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Cargando... Knocking on Heaven's Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death (edición 2013)por Katy Butler (Autor)
Información de la obraKnocking on Heaven's Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death por Katy Butler
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Inscríbete en LibraryThing para averiguar si este libro te gustará. Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro. All of us should read this and make preparations. ( ) I had a hard time reading this book because it was honestly hard thinking about the eventual death of my parents (and grandparents) and the author's heartfelt sentiments about her parents often hit very close to home. I'm glad I endured through it though, because this book gave me a ton to think about and discuss with my elders. A book about a family dealing with the death of the elderly and the trauma involved, this is a seriously flawed work. At one end, it is an almost cold, factual assessment of our medical system's faults in dealing with death and dying. At the other end, it is overloaded with highly emotional, contradictory, sometimes narcissistic and elitist rantings. Occasionally, it finds some balance and middle ground, and it provides some worthwhile substance for most people, but it could easily have been a third or a quarter the length and still provided all the good it had to offer. I suspect that some folks will happily wade knee deep in the emotions and miss some of the most salient issues, as did the author. I can't recall having read such a flawed non-fiction book that still had something worthwhile to say. Read it or not. I'm convinced one can get as much value elsewhere.
This book is a blend of memoir and investigative reporting—Butler has the chops to do both well—that looks at the ways that our desire for a peaceful, natural death may be hijacked by the medical industrial complex. Framed around the story of her parents—doctors refused to disable the pacemaker of her father, a dementia patient with a number of life-threatening illnesses—Butler looks at how out of our own control end-of-life decisions have become.
"An exquisitely written, expertly reported memoir and expose; of modern medicine that leads the way to more humane, less invasive end-of-life care based on the author's acclaimed New York Times Magazine piece. This is the story of one daughter's struggle to allow her parents the peaceful, natural deaths they wanted and to investigate the larger forces in medicine that stood in the way. When doctors refused to disable the pacemaker that caused her eighty-four-year-old father's heart to outlive his brain, Katy Butler, an award-winning science writer, embarked on a quest to understand why modern medicine was depriving him of a humane, timely death. After his lingering death, Katy's mother, nearly broken by years of nonstop caregiving, defied her doctors, refused open-heart surgery, and insisted on facing death the old-fashioned way: bravely, lucidly, and head on. Against this backdrop of familial love, wrenching moral choices, and redemption, Knocking on Heaven's Door celebrates the inventors of the 1950s who cobbled together lifesaving machines like the pacemaker and it exposes the tangled marriage of technology, medicine, and commerce that gave us a modern way of death: more painful, expensive, and prolonged than ever before. Caring for declining parents is a reality facing millions who may someday tell a doctor: "Let my parent go." A riveting exploration of the forgotten art of dying, Knocking on Heaven's Door empowers readers to create new rites of passage to the "Good Deaths" our ancestors so prized. Like Jessica Mitford's The American Way of Death and How We Die by Sherwin Nuland, it is sure to cause controversy and open minds"--
"A blend of memoir and investigation of the choices we face when our terror of death collides with the technological imperatives of modern medicine"-- No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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Google Books — Cargando... GénerosSistema Decimal Melvil (DDC)616.02Technology Medicine and health Diseases Pathology; Diseases; Treatment First aid; Emergency; EuthanasiaClasificación de la Biblioteca del CongresoValoraciónPromedio:
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