Summary of Caitlin Doughty's From Here to Eternity

Name: Summary of Caitlin Doughty's From Here to Eternity
Rating: 3.7142857142857144 (7 reviews)
Author: Everest Media,
ISBN: 9780393356281

by Everest Media,, Landis Blair

3.7

(7 ratings)

272 pages2022W. W. Norton & CompanyISBN 9780393356281

Travel

About this book

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 The cremation was scheduled to start at 7 a. m. Just as the sun broke through the blue light of dawn, the mourners began to gather. A gong rang through the air, and as her body caught fire, white smoke swirled about in tiny cyclones. The smell called to mind a passage from Edward Abbey: The fire. #2 In the late 1960s, in the Australian Outback, a young geologist discovered the cremated bones of an adult woman that might be up to 20,000 years old. The woman lived in a verdant landscape filled with giant creatures. For food, she collected fish, seeds, and the eggs of enormous emus. #3 The town of Crestone, Colorado, is a melting pot of spiritual seekers. It attracts people from all over the world who come to meditate there, and many are lifelong practitioners. #4 The first body to undergo a modern, scientific cremation in America was that of Baron Joseph Henry Louis Charles De Palm. His cremation was scheduled for December 1876, six months after his death. In the interim his corpse was injected with arsenic, and his organs were pulled from his body and his skin was covered with clay and carbolic acid by a local undertaker.

Publication Details

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2022
Pages: 272
ISBN: 9780393356281
Language: en

About Everest Media,

Caitlin Doughty is a mortician, activist, and funeral industry rabble-rouser. In 2011 she founded the death acceptance collective The Order of the Good Death, which has spawned the death positive movement. Her first book, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, was a New York Times best-seller. She lives in Los Angeles, where she runs her nonprofit funeral home, Undertaking LA. Born on a balmy August evening on the decidedly un-morbid shores of O’ahu, Hawai’i, Caitlin was an even-tempered, bookish child. Her parents had little reason to believe that she would ultimately seek a life tiptoeing the line between the living and the dead. It was only when she began to ask the pertinent questions that her parents suspected a proclivity toward the macabre. (Example: "Mommy, if I was on the edge of that cliff and I fell off and on the way down screamed, 'Mommy, Mommy, I need you Mommy why won't you help me,' and then smashed my body on the rocks, would you be sad? Yes or no, Mommy?") After high school, she fled east to the University of Chicago, where she graduated in medieval history. Her thesis, entitled "In Our Image: The Suppression of Demonic Births in Late Medieval Witchcraft Theory," is the summer must-read for all lovers of demon sex and the late medieval church. After graduation, Caitlin moved to California, where she has worked as a crematory operator, funeral director, a body-van transport driver, and returned to Cypress College for her second degree, in mortuary science. Unhappy with the state and offerings of the American funeral industry, in 2015 she opened her own alternative funeral home, Undertaking LA, to help people help themselves (handle a corpse). Caitlin's webseries "Ask a Mortician" and her work to change the death industry have led to features on National Public Radio, BBC, The New Yorker, Vice, The Atlantic, the New York Times, and Forbes. She frequently gives talks on the history of death culture, rituals, and the funeral industry, presenting for g