Research Catalog
Knocking on heaven's door : the path to a better way of death
- Title
- Knocking on heaven's door : the path to a better way of death / Katy Butler.
- Author
- Butler, Katy, 1949-
- Publication
- New York : Scribner, 2013.
- Supplementary Content
- Cover image
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| Status | Format | Access | Call Number | Item Location |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Available - Can be used on site. Please visit New York Public Library - Schwarzman Building to submit a request in person. | Text | Use in library | JFD 14-800 | Schwarzman Building - Main Reading Room 315 |
Details
- Description
- 322 pages : illustrations; 22 cm
- Summary
- "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"--
- Subjects
- Bibliography (note)
- Includes bibliographical references (pages 309-313).
- Call Number
- JFD 14-800
- ISBN
- 9781451641974
- 1451641974
- LCCN
- 2013017659
- OCLC
- 2013017659
- Author
- Butler, Katy, 1949-
- Title
- Knocking on heaven's door : the path to a better way of death / Katy Butler.
- Publisher
- New York : Scribner, 2013.
- Edition
- First Scribner hardcover edition.
- Type of Content
- text
- Type of Medium
- unmediated
- Type of Carrier
- volume
- Bibliography
- Includes bibliographical references (pages 309-313).
- Connect to:
- Research Call Number
- JFD 14-800