Knocking on heaven's door: the path to a better way of death

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Butler, Katy, 1949-

Butler, Katy

East Regional
Northeast Regional
Wake Forest Community

Adult Non-Fiction

East Regional - Adult Non-Fiction
Northeast Regional - Adult Non-Fiction
Wake Forest Community - Adult Non-Fiction

"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 struggleto 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 parentsis 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"--

Book

Books

fbc22357-d269-dfa4-4a76-c13b5506d6d7

9781451641974

2025-07-17T09:08:56.541Z

-1

Non Fiction

Non Fiction

616.02 BUTLE

Wake County Public Libraries

East Regional
Northeast Regional
Wake Forest Community

9781451641974

2013

Scribner

grouped_work

Adult children of aging parents -- Family relationships
Euthanasia -- Moral and ethical aspects
Terminal care
Terminal care -- Decision making

Knocking on heaven's door : the path to a better way of death

Knocking on heaven's door : the path to a better way of death / Katy Butler

Knocking on heaven's door

the path to a better way of death

Adult children of aging parents
Decision making
Euthanasia
Family relationships
Moral and ethical aspects
Terminal care