From Here to Eternity

Travelling the World to Find the Good Death

Author: Caitlin Doughty

Illustrator: Landis Blair

Read by: Caitlin Doughty

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At a Glance

Format
Digital Audiobook

Duration
05:37.29

Published: 25th January 2018

Digital Audiobook

$35.99

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As a practising mortician, Caitlin Doughty has long been fascinated by our pervasive terror of dead bodies. In From Here to Eternity she sets out in search of cultures unburdened by such fears. In rural Indonesia, she observes a man clean and dress his grandfather's mummified body. She meets Bolivian natitas (cigarette-smoking, wish-granting human skulls), and introduces us to the Japanese ritual of kotsuage, in which relatives use chopsticks to pluck their loved-ones' bones from cremation ashes.

With curiosity and morbid humour, Doughty introduces us to inspiring death-care innovators, participates in powerful death practices almost entirely unknown in the West and explores new spaces for mourning - including a futuristic glowing-Buddha columbarium in Japan, a candlelit Mexican cemetery, and America's only open-air pyre. In doing so she expands our sense of what it means to treat the dead with 'dignity' and reveals unexpected possibilities for our own death rituals.

Read by Caitlin Doughty
(p) 2017 Recorded Books LLC