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Final Acts
Price: $23.95
Subtitle: Death, Dying, and the
Choices We Make
Editors: Nan Bauer-Maglin
and Donna Perry
Subject: Health
and Medicine, Literature
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8135-4628-5
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8135-4627-8
Pages:
320 pages
Publication Date: November 2009
Description:
Today most people
die gradually, from incremental illnesses, rather than from the heart
attacks or fast-moving diseases that killed earlier generations. Given
this new reality, the essays in Final
Acts explore how we can make informed and caring end-of-life
choices for ourselves and for those we love—and what can happen without
such planning.
Contributors include patients, caretakers, physicians, journalists,
lawyers, social workers, educators, hospital administrators, academics,
psychologists, and a poet, and among them are ethicists, religious
believers, and nonbelievers. Some write moving, personal accounts of
“good” or ‘bad” deaths; others examine the ethical, social, and
political implications of slow dying. Essays consider death from
natural causes, suicide, and aid-in-dying (assisted suicide).
Writing in a style free of technical jargon, the contributors discuss
documents that should be prepared (health proxy, do-not-resuscitate
order, living will, power of attorney); decision-making (over medical
interventions, life support, hospice and palliative care, aid-in-dying,
treatment location, speaking for those who can no longer express their
will); and the roles played by religion, custom, family, friends,
caretakers, money, the medical establishment, and the government.
For those who yearn for some measure of control over death, the
essayists in Final Acts, from
very different backgrounds and with different personal and professional
experiences around death and dying, offer insight and hope.
About the Author:
NAN BAUER-MAGLIN, was
formerly a professor of English, Borough of Manhattan Community
College, CUNY, and academic director of the CUNY Baccalaureate Program.
She is the coeditor of “Bad
Girls/Good Girls”: Women, Sex, and Power in the Nineties (with
Donna Perry), Women Confronting
Retirement: A Nontraditional Guide, and Editor of Cut Loose: (Mostly) Older Women on the End
of Their (Mostly) Long-Term Relationships (Rutgers University
Press).
DONNA PERRY, is a
professor of English, teaches literature, writing, and women’s studies
courses at William Paterson University. She is the editor of Backtalk: Women Writers Speak Out
and coeditor (with Nan Bauer-Maglin) of “Bad Girls/Good Girls”: Women, Sex, and
Power in the Nineties (Rutgers University Press).
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Price: $23.95
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