On Death and Dying

Rating:
Summary: Used to be hot stuff.
Review: When I first started teaching an undergraduate course in Death & Dying in 1972, I could correctly assume that every student had already read Kubler-Ross. Now, they've never heard of her, which is a pity. Despite the total lack of evidence to support her five-stage paradigm, she did us all a favor by pulling the shroud off of the topic. She was the first popular writer to deal with feelings of the dying patient. Her book, which cost $1.95 back then, was hot stuff. She actually talked to terminally ill people and didn't beat around the bush. Now we've got any number of pop psychologists applying her five -stage theory to all sorts of things she never even thought of: grief, marriage problems, alcohol treatment, you name it. I tell my students that the staging theory has been around for 32 years now. If it is going to have any experimental support, perhaps it might have emerged by now. The fact is that people are much more complex than any five stages can account for, and people can hold more than one emotion at a time. I've heard Kubler-Ross herself say this many times. But, we can remember five ideas, so there you have it. If she'd proposed a 16-stage hierarchy, she would have never gotten big. At any rate, there are no real scientists in thanatology that now credit her much at all any more, but for historical purposes this is still a valuable book.

Rating:
Summary: A *very* useful guide through a *very* difficult time!
Review: When my mother was dying, I was confronted with a *lot* of issues to which I had never given much thought, having never been in that kind of position before. So, even the attitudes and beliefs about death I had carried for some time were brought into question, and I really needed some kind of simple guidance into how to approach all the very painful and confusing issues, both externally and internally. After I read this book, I was very much more confident about my own reactions, and had a lot more insight into how to handle the various communication and interpersonal difficulties inherent in this very stressful time.It's a simple book, easy to understand, and addresses all of the most important issues in a kind but factual manner.