From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death

"Fascinating content, colorful descriptions, and a wry voice. Most rewarding is how thought provoking this book is on death and how it fits as a part of life-or rather, how it needs to be given its own space in order to fully appreciate life."

"Cannot recommend this book highly enough"

"Not bad, opened my eyes to how America has turned something so intimate like death into profit."

"A beautiful, eye-opening look at death rituals and customs from cultures around the world presented in a entertaining informative way while still being dignified and respectful. "

"Poignant, touching, bizarre. "

"This was beautiful and thoughtful and expanded my mind in new ways. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I loved this book about death. And there is really no sugar coating it, this is 100% about death and grieving and I think more people need to read it. It’s covered extensively throughout the book, but America has a problem facing mortality. I am a product of that, but I wanted to face my “fears” because education and knowledge are important, and there is no event more worthy of examination than the ending of one’s life. That’s not something that should never be spoken about, and yet we don’t because it’s macabre and creepy and just plain impolite. Well, excuse me, but **** that. There are so many more healthy ways for us to celebrate a person’s life, even as we do need to deal with the details of death. And this book covers many different iterations of that across the globe in incredibly respectful ways.<br/><br/>Incidentally I picked this up because I was visiting the National Funeral Museum. Yes, it’s a thing, and it’s in Houston if anyone is curious. I highly recommend the experience, and it made me think of this book, which I’ve had on my radar for years and never got around to (or was avoiding because of the whole squeamish death thing we have here in the US, if we’re being honest). Going through the history of funeral customs in the US made me curious about the rest of the world, and as proof there really is a book about everything, here we are. But in all seriousness, there is much to learn from other cultures, and our own centricity will come to haunt us (probably not literally but hey, let’s keep open minds!) if we don’t look beyond our own way of caring for the dead. There are many ways to honor those we love, and I encourage you to become an armchair explorer for this unusual topic."

"One of my favorite reads under the theme of death."

"I'll take a sequel please and thank you."

"Fascinating. I was scrolling YouTube videos while reading this book to find visuals to compliment the practices described by the author and illustrated in these pages. So informative! And, I did find some interesting video examples, particularly of the Japanese practices described. The author's case that the the loss of death ritual in western culture is a detriment to our ability to cope with death and mortality, feeding death anxiety is interesting and worth thought and examination. This is a recommended read."

"A good book, especially for people who are interested in creepy/death things. I love Caitlin's Youtube channel, but there were a FEW points of contention I had which knocked this down a star. (1) She's supportive of would-be Islamic morticians who want to follow their no embalming tradition, but then later on critical of the Jewish and Islamic tradition of quick burial. It seems a bit hypocritical and ethnocentric considering that most of the book is praising traditional cultures for being different, but for those two very traditional practices she's against it since it doesn't fit with her point of view, even though those cultures have their own formal mourning process that's nothing like the corporate funeral industry in America. <br/>(2) The sections about the ñatitas took an usually roundabout way to describe where the skulls originated from. Honestly, when I hear that someone has a collection of human heads my first question is "whose heads are they?". Instead, she takes a long time to explain they aren't usually family members and then even later mentions that they can come from bodies of strangers who have been disinterred after 7 years. It's not clear what the process is for obtaining a stranger's head, but I'm guessing that rich people don't tend to end up as ñatitas. This could simply have been an oversight, but it was rather unsettling since it could easily have uncomfortable sociological underpinnings depending on the system."