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3 stars, books, borrowed book, Caitlin Doughty, first time read, From Here to Eternity, nonfiction, read in 2022, reading, review
Title: From Here to Eternity. Traveling the World to Find the Good Death
Author: Caitlin Doughty
First published: 2017
Dates read: 18. – 23. 02. 2022
Category: first time read, borrowed book, non-fiction
Rating: 3/5
The book in five words or less: informative, humorous, empathetic
My thoughts:
Anyone who has had a brush with the death-positive community on YouTube has come across Caitlin Doughty, or Ask A Mortician as she is known there, and, I suspect, so have a number of other people who are interested in related subjects such as bog bodies, mummies, weird celebrity death stories, and remarkable objects in museum collections. (Hello, yes, that last one is me.) As a Youtuber, Doughty is curious, knowledgable, compassionate, and blessed with an excellent dark sense of humour, and I’m happy to say that all of these aspects of her personality also come across in her writing.
From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death is Doughty’s second book – I haven’t read her first, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, yet – and its general trajectory is Doughty’s search for alternatives to the factory-style cremation- and embalming-heavy US-American way of dealing with the dead. In eight chapters, Doughty travels the world, and the US, to study a variety of different mourning and funerary practices and to find out what it means to treat the dead with dignity.
The chapters each focus on specific death-related practices: unburying and celebrating the mummified dead in Indonesia, natural pyre cremation in Colorado, body-farms and body-composting in North Carolina, Día de los Muertos, child death, and death rituals in Mexico, ñanitas and other (indigenous) forms of venerating the dead in Bolivia, Spanish funerary practices and cemetery management, new forms of memorials and grieving in Japan, natural burials in Joshua Tree National Park, and sky burials and other forms of animal involvement. In these chapters, Doughty raises interesting questions such as ‘what does dignity in death even mean’, ‘how can death be conceptualised, and does it always have to be understood as a hard border between the dead and the living’, ‘how can grieving be given (back) space in the death management process’, and ‘can decomposition be an act of reclaiming the body’.
Overall, I found Doughty’s style highly readable, her humour refreshing, her questions interesting, and her empathy commendable. However, I did not love From Here to Eternity quite as much as I’d hoped, and that is mostly due to Caitlin Doughty’s selection of case studies. To me, it wasn’t always clear why Doughty selected the places and phenomena she chose to highlight, and why, despite her claim to ‘travel the world’, about half of the chapters still took place somewhere in the US. I also wanted her chapters to go into more depth about the cultural contexts of the death practices she witnessed (please tell me more about the genderedness of communicating with the dead in Bolivia?), and I was unsure about her tendency to conflate ‘the West’ and ‘the US’. (As a European (I’m German) I can attest to the fact that even European funerary practices are very culturally diverse and often very different from those practiced in the US.)
These criticisms do not mean that I wouldn’t recommend From Here to Eternity, it just means that I wasn’t as wowed by it as I’d hoped to be. The book is definitely worth a read, especially for readers who want to confront their own notions about death and funerary practices. It is also, frankly, just a beautiful book, at least in the hardcover edition (it has pencil drawings!).
Read if you like: Caitling Doughty’s Youtube channel Ask a Mortician, slightly morbid topics, death (duh!), accessible non-fiction, pop-anthropology