From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death

by Caitlin Doughty, Landis Blair (Illustrator)

Overview

A New York Times and Los Angeles Times Bestseller

“Doughty chronicles [death] practices with tenderheartedness, a technician’s fascination, and an unsentimental respect for grief.” —Jill Lepore, The New Yorker

Fascinated by our pervasive fear of dead bodies, mortician Caitlin Doughty embarks on a global expedition to discover how other cultures care for the dead. From Zoroastrian sky burials to wish-granting Bolivian skulls, she investigates the world’s funerary customs and expands our sense of what it means to treat the dead with dignity. Her account questions the rituals of the American funeral industry—especially chemical embalming—and suggests that the most effective traditions are those that allow mourners to personally attend to the body of the deceased. Exquisitely illustrated by artist Landis Blair, From Here to Eternity is an adventure into the morbid unknown, a fascinating tour through the unique ways people everywhere confront mortality.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393356281
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	10/09/2018
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	42,913
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Caitlin Doughty is a mortician and the New York Times best-selling author of Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, From Here to Eternity, and Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? She is the creator of the web series Ask a Mortician, and the founder of The Order of the Good Death. She lives in Los Angeles, California, where she owns a funeral home.

Landis Blair illustrated the prize-winning graphic novel The Hunting Accident and the New York Times bestseller From Here to Eternity, and has published illustrations in the New York Times, Chicago magazine, and Medium. He lives in Chicago, Illinois.

Editorial Reviews

"Doughty is a relentlessly curious and chipper tour guide to the underworld, and the weirder things get, the happier she seems.… Her dispatches from the dark side [are] doing us all a kindness—offering a picture of what we’re in for, even if we’d rather not know."

New York Times Book Review

"It sounds a bit like Eat, Pray, Die, but her project is much larger than its premise first implies. She is searching not for personal spiritual enlightenment or the morbid titillation of thana-tourism, but for practical, radical alternatives to our corporatized death industry. Her travels illuminate a host of compelling possibilities for better funerals and a less fraught relationship with our dead."

New Republic

"Illuminating.… From Here to Eternity humanizes rituals that might otherwise seem unfathomable."

Paste

"Doughty writes bluntly about open-air cremations, natural burials and body composting, bringing a little more clarity and a little less mystery to the question: 'What happens to us after we die?'"

NPR - Our Guide to 2017's Great Reads

"From Here To Eternity is fascinating, thought-provoking and—who would have guessed?—sometimes funny. Put it on your bucket list."

Mail on Sundays

"Thought-provoking.… Unless you and your friends are immortal, this book pertains to you."

A. J. Jacobs

"Doughty finds the humanity in others cultures' relationship with death that seems to be lacking in ours."

VICE

"The macabre travelogue is a thoughtful reflection and a smart critique of the American funeral industry, with plenty of gallows humor thrown in."

Smithsonian - The Ten Best Travel Books of 2017

"This humane book gently provokes you to wonder: what exactly is your ideal funeral?"

The Times

…Doughty is a relentlessly curious and chipper tour guide to the underworld, and the weirder things get, the happier she seems…American death practices, she writes, have become brief, distant and sterile. Doughty takes readers around the globe in search of alternative rituals and doesn't hold back on the gory details…Doughty is a likable, witty companion…It is a difficult high-wire act: to make death interesting and funny enough that we'll drop our fears and read, without losing sight of the gravity of the topic. The entertaining adventures are a cover for an attempt at a profound cultural subversion, and for the most part, it works. I couldn't help thinking that her dispatches from the dark side were doing us all a kindness—offering a picture of what we're in for, even if we'd rather not know.

The New York Times Book Review - Libby Copeland

★ 10/02/2017
Mortician Doughty (Smoke Gets in Your Eyes) catalogues rituals and cultural practices surrounding death from all over the world in this fantastic memoir, which is intended to “help us reclaim meaning and tradition in our own community.” Doughty, a mortician who doesn’t abide by typical American funeral protocols of embalming quickly and upselling products, relates practices—glass display cases in funeral homes in Barcelona, natural (casket-free) burials in Los Angeles, a mummified family member hanging out in an Indonesian living room for years before being buried— that will inspire readers to reconsider familiar rituals surrounding death. Doughty also explores the increasing corporatization of death and the growing popularity (and carbon footprint) of cremation. With humor and snappy descriptions, she also gleefully punches holes in Western misconceptions and prejudices concerning death rituals in other countries, as when a travel guide snubbed as a “ghoulish spectacle” the intricate, beautiful bamboo cages used in Bali for decomposition. Doughty’s skillful book will encourage debate on philosophical and moral preferences for posthumous care. Agent: Anna Sproul-Latimer, Ross Yoon. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

"Doughty finds the humanity in others cultures' relationship with death that seems to be lacking in ours."

Vice - Justin Caffier

"This slim volume, full of captivating, enlightening, and humorous tidbits, is a—dare I say—uplifting exploration of what people the world over do to withstand loss and the bite of impermanence. This is death as viewed by a mortician: profound, unavoidable, natural, and a bit funny."

KQED

"Doughty chronicles [death] practices with tenderheartedness, a technician’s fascination, and an unsentimental respect for grief."

The New Yorker - Jill Lepore

"Doughty is a relentlessly curious and chipper tour guide to the underworld, and the weirder things get, the happier she seems. … [H]er dispatches from the dark side [are] doing us all a kindness—offering a picture of what we’re in for, even if we’d rather not know."

Libby Copeland

"[T]he macabre travelogue is a thoughtful reflection and a smart critique of the American funeral industry, with plenty of gallows humor thrown in."

Smithsonian (The Ten Best Travel Books of 2017)

"Caitlin Doughty is razor sharp, and writes about death with exceptional clarity and style. From Here to Eternity manages to be both an extremely funny travelogue and a deeply moving book about what death means to us all."

Dylan Thuras

"In her jocular but reverential tone… Doughty doesn’t offer a simple morbid travelogue; instead, she digs into diverse death experiences with deep veneration and examines ties to socioeconomic, status, female identity, and religion."

Booklist

"Doughty writes bluntly about open-air cremations, natural burials and body composting, bringing a little more clarity and a little less mystery to the question: 'What happens to us after we die?'"

NPR (Our Guide to 2017's Great Reads)

"From Here To Eternity is fascinating, thought-provoking and – who would have guessed? – sometimes funny. Put it on your bucket list."

The Mail

09/01/2017
In her first book, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, Doughty shared her experiences working in a crematory. Here, the author travels the world observing and researching rituals surrounding death in other cultures, bringing the lessons she learns home with her. She visits a technologically advanced columbarium in Japan, where robots retrieve a relative's urn with the scan of a keycard, and the only open-air pyre in the United States. In a remote region of Indonesia, she witnesses people tending their loved ones' mummified corpses, some of which are kept in family homes. In Spain, families spend time with the deceased, but only when the bodies are kept behind glass. Doughty views skulls that grant wishes in Bolivia, candlelit Mexican cemeteries on the Day of the Dead, and experiments with composting human bodies in North Carolina. She is the ideal guide on this journey, curious and respectful, eventually determining that as different as all of these experiences are, they're connected by the idea of "holding space" for loved ones-giving them time to mourn and a sense of purpose as they grieve. VERDICT Recommended for fans of the author and those with an interest in anthropology and ritual. [See Prepub Alert, 4/10/17.]—Stephanie Klose, Library Journal

Library Journal

01/01/2018
Doughty, founder of the Order of the Good Death, a nonprofit organization that advocates for natural burial and reducing the stigma around death, describes funereal rituals around the world while stopping to reflect on U.S. practices. In Indonesia, for instance, the Toraja keep the dead at home for several months or years until the funeral. The author also explores the North Carolina's FOREST facility, which composts corpses, and the Crestone End of Life, a Colorado nonprofit that performs open-air cremations. Doughty shares her reverence for the dead while poking fun at our fears ("gross as it sounds, I'd come back from the dead for a Diet Coke"). She forces U.S. readers to confront the secretive and profitable mortuary business and sheds light on cultures that celebrate death. If death is inevitable, she asks, why are we afraid to address it? As the Bolivians look to their natitas (special human skulls), we can look to them for a level of comfort and familiarity with death. "How would your ancestors deal with tragedy?" Probably not with a $10,000 check to take a dead body away. VERDICT Recommend this fascinating and well-written book to fans of Mary Roach's Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers.—Pamela Schembri, Horace Greeley High School, Chappaqua, NY

School Library Journal

2017-07-12
In the follow-up to her well-received debut, Smoke Gets in your Eyes (2014), a mortician delivers a wide-eyed report on burial customs across the world.At the unique funeral parlor she owns and operates in Southern California, Doughty adopts a "younger, progressive" approach to burial protocol. Unwilling to accept the way that the necessity of "deathcare" has evolved into such a commercialized and bureaucratic industry, the inquisitive undertaker presents her globe-trotting experiences exploring and appreciating the eccentric and widely diverse death rituals across international cultures. In offering opposing perspectives that dignify, celebrate, and decorate the body in its expired state, Doughty hopes to do her part in spurring a reform of the funeral industry and to help change the squeamishness of Western attitudes toward death and the sanctity of the sacred burial. Her fascinating tour of rituals contains liturgies that readers will surely observe as rare, macabre, unbelievable, ancient, and precious—sometimes simultaneously. Among them: a Central American body thief validates why he confiscated his grandmother's body from a hospital; a cremation via community open-air pyre in Colorado (the only one of its kind in America), complete with flute and didgeridoo accompaniment; mummification restorations in Indonesia; and the glass encasement coffins of Barcelona: "Glass means transparency, unclouded confrontation with the brutal reality of death. Glass also means a solid barrier. It allows you to come close but never quite make contact." In Japan, where corpses were once perceived to be impure, now they are revered as beloved and their memorialization has been fully ritualized with the aid of technology and innovation. Green, eco-friendly "human composting" methods also have their place in the author's entertaining and thought-provoking narrative. Grimly enhanced by the artwork of Blair, these observances demonstrate how to diminish the stigma associated with death, burial, and eternal remembrance. Death gets the last word in this affably written, meticulously researched study of funerary customs.

Kirkus Reviews