In Dying to Work, Jonathan Karmel raises our awareness of unsafe working conditions with accounts of workers who were needlessly injured or killed on the job. Based on heart-wrenching interviews Karmel conducted with injured workers and surviving family members across the country, the stories in this book are introduced in a way that helps place them in a historical and political context and represent a wide survey of the American workplace, including, among others, warehouse workers, grocery store clerks, hotel housekeepers, and river dredgers. Karmel’s examples are portraits of the lives and dreams cut short and reports of the workplace incidents that tragically changed the lives of everyone around them. Dying to Work includes incidents from industries and jobs that we do not commonly associate with injuries and fatalities and highlights the risks faced by workers who are hidden in plain view all around us. While exposing the failure of safety laws that leave millions of workers without compensation and employers without any meaningful incentive to protect their workers, Karmel offers the reader some hope in the form of policy suggestions that may make American workers safer and employers more accountable. This is a book for anyone interested in issues of worker health and safety, and it will also serve as the cornerstone for courses in public policy, community health, labor studies, business ethics, regulation and safety, and occupational and environmental health policy.

National Book Award Finalist: “The poetic and horrific combine in this tale of love and death set in a Syria torn apart by civil war” (Guardian, UK). As elderly Abdel Latif dies peacefully in a hospital bed in Damascus, he relays his final wish to his youngest son Bolbol: to be buried in the family plot in their ancestral village of Anabiya. Though Bolbol is estranged from his siblings, he persuades his older brother Hussein and his sister Fatima to accompany him and the body to Anabiya, which is—after all—only a two-hour drive from Damascus. There’s only one problem: Their country is a war zone. With the landscape of their childhood now a labyrinth of competing armies whose actions are at once arbitrary and lethal, the siblings’ decision to set aside their differences and honor their father’s request quickly balloons from a minor commitment into an epic and life-threatening quest. Syria, however, is no longer a place for heroes, and the decisions the family must make along the way—as they find themselves captured and recaptured, interrogated, imprisoned, and bombed—will prove to have enormous consequences for all of them. One of Syria’s most acclaimed literary voices, Khaled Khalifa was the greatest chronicler of his country’s catastrophic civil war. In Death is Hard Work, he delivers a tale of three ordinary people facing down the stuff of nightmares armed with little more than simple determination. Winner of the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature Finalist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature

Practitioners who work with clients at the end of their lives face difficult decisions concerning the client's self-determination, the kind of death he or she will have, and the prolongation of life. They must also remain sensitive to the beliefs and needs of family members and the legal, ethical, and spiritual ramifications of the client's death. Featuring twenty-three decision cases based on interviews with professional social workers, this unique volume allows students to wrestle with the often incomplete and conflicting information, ethical issues, and time constraints of actual cases. Instead of offering easy solutions, this book provides detailed accounts that provoke stimulating debates among students, enabling them to confront their own responses, beliefs, and uncertainties to hone their critical thinking and decision making skills for professional practice. *Please note: Teaching Notes for this volume will be available from Electronic Hallway in Spring 2010. To access the Teaching Notes, you must first become a member of the Electronic Hallway. The main Electronic Hallway web page is at https://hallway.org/index.php. To join, click Become a Hallway Member in the Get Involved category or point your browser directly to https://hallway.org/involved/join.php and provide the required information. After your instructor status has been confirmed, you will receive an e-mail granting access to the Electronic Hallway. Once logged on to Electronic Hallway as a member, click Case Search in the Cases and Resources category on themain web page. Enter "death, dying, bereavement" (without the quotation marks) in the search box, select "all of the words" in the drop down menu, and click Submit. The search process will generate a list of Teaching Notes for cases from Dying, Death, and Bereavement in Social Work Practice: Decision Cases for Advanced Practice.

Michael K. Rosenow investigates working people's beliefs, rituals of dying, and the politics of death by honing in on three overarching questions: How did workers, their families, and their communities experience death? Did various identities of class, race, gender, and religion coalesce to form distinct cultures of death for working people? And how did people's attitudes toward death reflect notions of who mattered in U.S. society? Drawing from an eclectic array of sources ranging from Andrew Carnegie to grave markers in Chicago's potter's field, Rosenow portrays the complex political, social, and cultural relationships that fueled the United States' industrial ascent. The result is an undertaking that adds emotional depth to existing history while challenging our understanding of modes of cultural transmission.

“An honest, practical, as well as emotional guide to working through the processing of mourning” (Vogue), Grief Works is a lifeline for all of us dealing with loss and a handbook to help others—from the “expected” death of a parent to the sudden and unexpected death of a child or spouse. Death affects us all. Yet it is still the last taboo in our society, and grief is still profoundly misunderstood. Julia Samuel, a grief psychotherapist, has spent twenty-five years working with the bereaved and understanding the full repercussions of loss. In Grief Works, Samuel shares case studies from those who have experienced great love and great loss—and survived. People need to understand that grief is a process that has to be worked through, and Samuel shows if we do the work, we can begin to heal. “As a guide for the newly grieving, Grief Works succeeds on many levels, and the author’s compassionate storytelling skills provide even broader appeal…and consistently hit an authentically inspiring note” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). “Illuminating” (The New York Times), intimate, warm, and helpful, Samuel is a caring and deeply experienced guide through the shadowy and mutable land of grief, and her book is as invaluable to those who are grieving as it is to those around them. She adroitly unpacks the psychological tangles of grief in a voice that is compassionate, grounded, real, and observant of those in mourning. Divided into case histories grouped by who has died—a partner, a parent, a sibling, a child, as well section dealing with terminal illness and suicide—Grief Works shows us how to live and learn from great loss. This important book is “essential for anyone who has ever experienced grief or wanted to comfort a bereaved friend” (Helen Fielding, author of Bridget Jones’s Diary).

The meaning of our concern for mortal remains—from antiquity through the twentieth century The Greek philosopher Diogenes said that when he died his body should be tossed over the city walls for beasts to scavenge. Why should he or anyone else care what became of his corpse? In The Work of the Dead, acclaimed cultural historian Thomas Laqueur examines why humanity has universally rejected Diogenes's argument. No culture has been indifferent to mortal remains. Even in our supposedly disenchanted scientific age, the dead body still matters—for individuals, communities, and nations. A remarkably ambitious history, The Work of the Dead offers a compelling and richly detailed account of how and why the living have cared for the dead, from antiquity to the twentieth century. The book draws on a vast range of sources—from mortuary archaeology, medical tracts, letters, songs, poems, and novels to painting and landscapes in order to recover the work that the dead do for the living: making human communities that connect the past and the future. Laqueur shows how the churchyard became the dominant resting place of the dead during the Middle Ages and why the cemetery largely supplanted it during the modern period. He traces how and why since the nineteenth century we have come to gather the names of the dead on great lists and memorials and why being buried without a name has become so disturbing. And finally, he tells how modern cremation, begun as a fantasy of stripping death of its history, ultimately failed—and how even the ashes of the victims of the Holocaust have been preserved in culture. A fascinating chronicle of how we shape the dead and are in turn shaped by them, this is a landmark work of cultural history.

While largely unknown today, Danish writer Jens Peter Jacobsen was the leading prose writer in Scandinavia in the late nineteenth century. Despite his untimely death from tuberculosis at the age of thirty-eight, Jacobsen became a cult figure to an entire generation and continues to occupy an important place in Scandinavian cultural history. In this book, Morten Høi Jensen gives a moving account of Jacobsen's life, work, and death.--Adapted from book jacket.

Honor your loved ones and the earth by choosing practical, spiritual, and eco-friendly after-death care Natural, legal, and innovative after-death care options are transforming the paradigm of the existing funeral industry, helping families and communities recover their instinctive capacity to care for a loved one after death and do so in creative and healing ways. Reimagining Death offers stories and guidance for home funeral vigils, advance after-death care directives, green burials, and conscious dying. When we bring art and beauty, meaningful ritual, and joy to ease our loss and sorrow, we are greening the gateway of death and returning home to ourselves, to the wisdom of our bodies, and to the earth.