On Death - (Field Notes) by Sandra Martin (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

On Death explores our complicating and changing relationship with death.

There used to be a time when death was everywhere about us, inescapable, back when we had higher infant mortality and a lower life expectancy, and before vaccines, when diseases would ravage populations. Funerals happened in people's houses, families sat with and prepared their loved one's corpses; they understood the feel of death, and how it affected all the senses. But with advancements in science and medicine, we've almost been able to shunt death off to an attic, making us believe that we can cheat death, at least for a very long time, and that death is somehow a failure.

In On Death, Sandra Martin explores our complicating and changing relationship with death. From our fear of death and how we seek more invasive ways to get around it, to how medical assistance in dying has given us both the reality and illusion of control, to the importance of rituals for how we grieve.

Review Quotes

Praise for A Good Death

"A timely & deeply felt account of assisted dying: the histories, the issues."
--Margaret Atwood

"[An] excellent new book . . . The timeliness is hard to overstate."
--Globe and Mail

About the Author

Sandra Martin, an award-winning journalist, is the author of the critically acclaimed national bestseller, A Good Death: Making the Most of Our Final Choices. Winner of the BC National Non-Fiction Award and a finalist for both the Dafoe Prize and the Donner Prize in Public Policy, A Good Death was named one of the best books of 2016 by The Globe and Mail, the CBC and several other media outlets. Her previous books include Working the Dead Beat: 50 Lives that Changed Canada, The First Man in My Life: Daughters Write about Their Fathers, and Card Tricks: Bankers, Boomers and the Explosion of Plastic Credit.