Zion National Park is home to majestic and wondrous canyons, cliffs, crags, mesas, rivers, and slot canyons. World travelers remain in awe as they drive, walk, hike, and climb into such a unique place that is filled with vibrant, sacred, and mystical energy. Gradually becoming transfixed, many push themselves further into the wilds, oblivious to weather and dangers, deeper into the backcountry, suddenly finding themselves in extreme predicaments. These are the moments when accidents often ...

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, The Denial of Death explores how people and cultures around the world have reacted to the concept of death from celebrated cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker.Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1974 and the culmination of a life’s work, The Denial of Death is Ernest Becker’s brilliant and impassioned answer to the “why” of human existence. In bold contrast to the predominant Freudian school of thought, Becker tackles t...

Only the scathing wit and searching intelligence of Jessica Mitford could turn an exposé of the American funeral industry into a book that is at once deadly serious and side-splittingly funny. When first published in 1963, this landmark of investigative journalism became a runaway bestseller and resulted in legislation to protect grieving families from the unscrupulous sales practices of those in "the dismal trade."Just before her death in 1996, Mitford thoroughly revised and updat...

A fascinating exploration of the universal human experience of death. We sat around and on the bed, laughing and joking as if this was a typical family gathering. The shrunken form of our dying grandmother lay on the bed, breathing fast and shallow, her once-bright eyes half closed and sunken in their sockets. To some it might have seemed disrespectful to be treating her as part of the furniture as she took what were her very last breaths on this earth. But to us, it seemed almost normal t...

Important and provocative, The Undead examines why even with the tools of advanced technology, what we think of as life and death, consciousness and nonconsciousness, is not exactly clear and how this problem has been further complicated by the business of organ harvesting.Dick Teresi, a science writer with a dark sense of humor, manages to make this story entertaining, informative, and accessible as he shows how death determination has become more complicated than ever. T...

Imagine heading out for a six-month trip to a foreign country intending to live in a recreational vehicle. First you would have to quickly locate and then buy a satisfactory vehicle so you could get on the road to see as much as possible in the time allotted.Bill and Marcia Hogan did that starting out in Cairns, Australia and had the time of their lives, seeing the beautiful sights of Australia and meeting many wonderful people. They stayed mainly in caravan parks where the Aussies...

A Better Place describes the practices around death and burial in 19th-century Ontario. Funeral rituals, strong religious beliefs, and a firm conviction that death was a beginning not an end helped the bereaved through their times of loss in a century where death was always close at hand.The book describes the pioneer funeral in detail as well as the factors that changed this simple funeral into the elaborate etiquette-driven Victorian funeral at the end of the century. It...

A magisterial work of social history, Life After Death illuminates the many different ways ancient civilizations grappled with the question of what exactly happens to us after we die.In a masterful exploration of how Western civilizations have defined the afterlife, Alan F. Segal weaves together biblical and literary scholarship, sociology, history, and philosophy. A renowned scholar, Segal examines the maps of the afterlife found in Western religious texts and reveals not...

Thoughtful, amusing, and provocative, Making an Exit will transform the way you look at life's last passage. Because, as Murray discovers, death is, for many, not an ending but the start of something new.Author and journalist Sarah Murray never gave much thought to what might ultimately happen to her remains—that was, until her father died. While he'd always insisted that the "organic matter" left after a person takes their last breath had no sign...

A concise, yet highly detailed, overview of the many national parks and monuments in Southern Utah. Award-winning author Nicky Leach reveals the splendor of the Colorado Plateau as few other writers can. Come Explore!

The Tao of Loss and Grief provides the reader with a gentle philosophy of life and living based upon Lao Tzu's classic Tao Te Ching. The Tao of grieving acknowledges the mysteries of life and its many difficulties and surprises .Loss and the responding emotional response of grief are part of the mysterious whole of life. In this experience are also hope, love, forgiveness, and recovery from the loss. The book is written to be read from the beginning to end and/or to be read by selecting ch...

For those who don’t believe in an afterlife, the wisdom of the ages offers four great consolations for mortality: that death is benign and good; that mortal life provides its own kind of immortality; that true immortality would be awful; and that we experience the kinds of losses in life that we will eventually face in death. Can any of these consolations honestly reconcile us to our inevitable demise?   In this timely book, Andrew Stark tests the psychological truth of these con...