From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death in Science and Inquiry

Nov 07, 2017 Petra X rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: popculture-anthropology, 2017-100-reviews, travel-adventure-countries, 2017-read, death, reviewed

This is a brief tour of some of the world's strangest burial practices. In the epilogue, thanking people, Caitlin says, "Finally Landis Blair, who was an all-right boyfriend but is now a killer collaborator". And that feels like the key to this all-right, 3.5 star (at best) book.

It feels like flushed with the deserved success of first book, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory, the author had decided to have a dual career as of funeral home proprietor and writer and had This is a brief tour of some of the world's strangest burial practices. In the epilogue, thanking people, Caitlin says, "Finally Landis Blair, who was an all-right boyfriend but is now a killer collaborator". And that feels like the key to this all-right, 3.5 star (at best) book.

It feels like flushed with the deserved success of first book, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory, the author had decided to have a dual career as of funeral home proprietor and writer and had cast around for a subject to write about it. A tour of the world's more unusual funerary practices! It was so obvious.

There was a New Age funeral pyre in Colorado, the scraped-clean and dressed dead of Sulawesi brought out for their annual, communal party. Then in Bolivia, skulls it seemed everyone had in their home that they and bring offerings to ask favours of (and get blessed by the local Catholic priest). In another country graves are only rented and then the remains turfed out if the family fail to pay. The most interesting was Tibet where the recently dead are chopped up and mixed with flour and butter and offered to birds of prey who having filled up on the corpses fly off, and so it is known, poetically, as 'sky burial'.

I knew most of these funeral rituals so it wasn't that interesting. But one thing really caught my attention. We are schooled to think of Buddhism as some ideal spiritual philosophy, something peaceful that brings contentment, despite one of the world's most celebrated Buddhists and well known champions of human rights, Aung San Suu Kyi's support of the state persecution and violence directed at the Muslims in Myanmar.

But is this not modern thinking? This is what the Buddha thought of women:

"The ancient scriptures tell of the Buddha encouraging his community of male monks to take trips to the charnel grounds to meditate on women’s rotting bodies. The motive of these “meditations on foulness” was to liberate a monk from his desire for women; they were, as scholar Liz Wilson calls them, “sensual stumbling blocks.”

The hope was that charnel meditation would strip women of all their desirable qualities so men would realize they are merely flesh-sacks filled with blood, guts, and phlegm. The Buddha was explicit, claiming that a woman’s deception is not in her accessories, like makeup and gowns, but in her fraudulent garment of flesh, surreptitiously oozing grotesque liquids from its orifices."

That was enlightening. For that the author gets upped to 4 stars.

It's a good book, very readable, the insights and descriptions are very much of the popular science genre, not too deep, not too challenging, a quick read and light non-fiction. It does make you realise that a funeral is for the benefit of the mourners and the funeral directors. You might want to consider a ritual that is personal for the family, and less the killingly expensive pressure that benefits the funeral directors. ...more

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Sep 25, 2024 Holli rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: kids-books

Fascinating discussion on death, traditions, and rituals. Some really good ideas on how to better honor the lives of those we love.

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Apr 15, 2020 JZ rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites, aubk, read-2020, memoir, authr, non-fiction, home, mbnf

Fantastic!

Particularly in this time of Covid 19 and no funerals,

I had already decided to forego the usual services and burial, and try to find a natural burial arrangements for myself and for my mother.

Since two of my friends have lost a parent to the virus in the last week, I thought it was time to listen to this.

I was right. This is comforting, informative, and amusing. A nearly impossible trifecta to carry off.

No time like the present!

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