A review by spcandybars
From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death by Caitlin Doughty

adventurous informative lighthearted reflective fast-paced

4.5

I think this book is near perfect. Caitlin Doughty is a fantastic audiobook narrator with perfect amounts of inflection and clear intonation that make the listening process quick and enjoyable. The stories across the globe are well structured and creatively presented and I feel like I’ve stepped away with so many death customs that I’m interested in reading about. I do think the book would have benefitted from compartmentalizing the American mummies and death practices from the international ones and grouping those by ethnographic proximity but that’s probably just because of how I listened to it. The order she presents things in makes sense - she goes to an area and learns about a death ritual or interaction specific to the area which leads to a rumination which leads to the next area. It’s actually a fine structure but when you’re listening to long spans of the book at once, you recognize how much stories from geographically close countries are reminiscent of each other. There’s a really cool opportunity to explore the progression of death traditions in these countries and dig into why certain practices hold so strongly within a subsection of cultures or group of cultural ideals. 

In the end though, that isn’t really the point of From Here To Eternity. Like all of her books, Caitlin Doughty’s aim is to both inform on the relationship between people and death and create a space for us to question our own death practices and face mortality safely. This book accomplishes that quite well. 
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