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Death: The Final Stage of Growth
by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Scribner (1986-04-02)
ISBN: 0671622382
EAN: 9780671622381
Dewy Decimal #: 155.937
Paperback: 204 pages
SKU: 38223
Condition: New
Comments: THE LARGER SOFTBACK BOOK! PRENTICE-HALL, 1975. THE UNABRIDGED 1ST EDITION. SOFTCOVER BOOK AND PAGES ARE IN GREAT CONDITION. THE BOOK IS NEW. Rapid shipping w/FREE tracking. GREAT PACKAGING . Air Mail. GR.
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
Ours is a death-denying society. But death is inevitable, and we must face the question of how to deal with it. Coming to terms with our own finiteness helps us discover life's true meaning.Why do we treat death as a taboo? What are the sources of our fears? How do we express our grief, and how do we accept the death of a person close to us? How can we prepare for our own death? Drawing on our own and other cultures' views of death and dying, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross provides some illuminating answers to these and other questions. She offers a spectrum of viewpoints, including those of ministers, rabbis, doctors, nurses, and sociologists, and the personal accounts of those near death and of their survivors. Once we come to terms with death as a part of human development, the author shows, death can provide us with a key to the meaning of human existence.
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Customer Reviews
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Comfort
Rating  (5)
Date: 2007-01-21
1 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
This book should be read by anyone whatever the personal situation is. It helps particularly when you are about to loose or if you have lost a loved one.
We know nothing about death and we are never prepared to face it. Reading this book gives comfort, helps to ease the pain, and also teaches us to respect and honour all the living as well as the importance of living fully and consciously the time we have.
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A work that explores death from a cultural, sociological and multi-religious point-of-view.
Rating (5)
Date: 2005-08-18
10 out of 11 customers found this reveiw helpful
Death: The Final Stage of Growth is an especially enlightening work not simply because of the varied and knowledgeable contributed views to this particular volume, but because it approaches death and dying not from a scientific or psychological standpoint, but rather, from a cultural, sociological and mixed religious context. The essays that focus on the Eskimo, Jewish, Hindu and Buddhist approach to death and dying are deeply taken into account, as are their rituals, their cultural approaches and their belief systems. But though all the faith approaches differ in one way or another, the unifying human elements are-for the most part-a consistent grief, fear, faith of a higher authority and the oncoming trials and tribulations that dying can and will entail, all of which unites us. Dignity should begin at the conception of life, and it does not cease until the last breath is taken and arrangements for what follows are respectfully set up. But in many cases, as illustrated in the section entitled: "The Organizational Context of Dying" by Hans O. Mauksch, once a person is diagnosed as having a terminal illness and thus becomes a full-time patient, (s)he, after stripping and handing over their possessions, is banded like a piece of property They then are quickly yet efficiently-like in the military or in religious life-slowly deloused of their sense of autonomy; they are gradually assilimated to the institution. And their physical and mental definitions are not fully acknowledged. It is not done out of spiteful cruelty, just ignorant insensitivity. But through psychological studies-as done by Kubler-Ross as well as others in the field-and radical restructuring in pallative care, hospitals are really no longer deemed as the menacing sick houses of olden times. Rather, the patient as a whole is acknowledged, not merely the physical self. The soul, the intelligence, the humor and wisdom. The "all" of the person is taken into account, and as that is so, the hospital environment in its own right changes for the better. But it stems from communication and compassion and facing what for almost all of us is the ultimate and insurmountable phobia. All in all, Death: The Final Stage of Growth is another excellent and necessary Kubler-Ross offering.
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Author Dies at 78
Rating (5)
Date: 2004-09-05
5 out of 7 customers found this reveiw helpful
'On Death and Dying' Author Dies at 78
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, a psychiatrist who revolutionized the way the world looks at terminally ill patients with her book "On Death and Dying" and later as a pioneer for hospice care, has died. She was 78.
She died Tuesday of natural causes at her Scottsdale home, family members said.
Published in 1969, "On Death and Dying" focused on the needs of the dying and offered her theory that they go through five stages of grief - denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.
"Those who learned to know death, rather than to fear and fight it, become our teachers about life," she once wrote. In another passage, she wrote: "Dying is nothing to fear. It can be the most wonderful experience of your life. It all depends on how you have lived."
Kubler-Ross wrote 12 books after "On Death and Dying," including how to deal with the death of a child and an early study on the AIDS epidemic.
"She brought the taboo notion of death and dying into the public consciousness," said Stephen Connor, vice president of the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization.
In 1979, she received the Ladies' Home Journal Woman of the Decade Award. In 1999, Time magazine named Kubler-Ross as one of the "100 Most Important Thinkers" of the past century.
Born in Zurich, Switzerland, Kubler-Ross graduated from medical school at the University of Zurich in 1957. She came to New York the following year and was appalled by hospital treatment of dying patients.
Whoever has seen the horrifying appearance of the postwar European concentration camps would be similarly preoccupied," she said.
She began her work with the terminally ill at the University of Colorado Medical Center in Denver, and was a clinical professor of behavioral medicine and psychiatry at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.
Kubler-Ross began giving lectures featuring terminally ill patients, who talked about what they were going through. That led to her 1969 book.
"Dying becomes lonely and impersonal because the patient is often taken out of his familiar environment and rushed to an emergency room," she wrote.
"He may cry for rest, peace and dignity, but he will get infusions, transfusions, a heart machine, or tracheostomy. ... He will get a dozen people around the clock, all busily preoccupied with his heart rate, pulse, electrocardiogram or pulmonary functions, his secretions or excretions - but not with him as a human being."
The most important thing Kubler-Ross did was bring death out of the dark for the medical community, said Carol Baldwin, a research associate professor of medicine at the University of Arizona and who worked as a nurse in one of the nation's first hospices in 1979.
"She really set the standards for how to communicate with the dying and their loved ones," Baldwin said recently. "Families learned that it's not a scary thing to watch someone die."
Kubler-Ross is survived her two children, Kenneth Ross and Barbara Lee Ross, and two granddaughters.
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Sharing our common humanity...
Rating (5)
Date: 2004-07-26
16 out of 17 customers found this reveiw helpful
One of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross's books, 'On Death and Dying', is a classic work in the field, still used to educate and inform medical, counseling, and pastoral professionals since its original publication in the 1960s. Kubler-Ross did extensive research in the field by actually talking to those in the process of dying, something that had hitherto been considered taboo and an unthinkable, uncaring thing to do. Kubler-Ross asked for volunteers, and never pressured people to do or say anything they didn't want to. One of her unexpected discoveries was that the medical professionals were more reluctant to participate than were the patients, who quite often felt gratitude and relief at being able to be heard.
This book, 'Death: The Final Stage of Growth' continued that research; Kubler-Ross is the editor here rather than an author, and the text is primarily in others' words. This includes other doctors and psychiatrists, patients, and family members. Kubler-Ross in her research spoke to families, and followed people through their ailments, sometimes to recovery, but most often to their death. She let the people guide her in her research; here she lets them speak for themselves for the most part.
This caring approach was often an aggravation for Kubler-Ross and her staff, because they would know what the patient had been told but was not yet ready to face. Kubler-Ross recounts stories of attempts to deal with death in different ways; denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance -- in fact, the various stages of grief were first recognised in Kubler-Ross's research. There are those who dislike the 'stages; theory of grief, but it is important to know (as the quote above indicates) that these are not set-in-stone processes, but rather dialectical and perichoretic in nature, ebbing and flowing like the tide, so that where a person was 'stage-wise' would vary from meeting to meeting.
Kubler-Ross drew together a diverse collection of views for this book, finding meaning both in life and death. This book provides insights for health-care professionals and clergy, as well as the families, friends, and companions of those who are dying. There are insights here to help cope and find meaning and resolution in death.
Death is a difficult subject to comprehend, and even more difficult to deal with. Kubler-Ross includes an anonymous letter from a student nurse who discovered she was dying, and wrote a letter to fellow hospital workers giving a first-person account of what it is like to be on the receiving end of the treatment - something which, like it or not, most of us will eventually face. This is part of our common humanity.
It is important not to approach this subject merely as an intellectual or theoretical subject -- it is not sufficient to subscribe to a 'pie-in-the-sky' kind of theology about afterlife the denies the emotions in this world. Even those with firm belief and faith will still experience the loss in this world.
This book is lovingly written, well-researched and full of insight. While some of Kubler-Ross's ideas have over time become oversimplified, and some research has been superseded, her example of bringing a difficult subject to the area of regular conversation and consideration cannot be underestimated, and this book is part of that legacy.
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Everyday one is questioned by life,choose to live the moment
Rating  (4)
Date: 2000-01-09
52 out of 69 customers found this reveiw helpful
Kubler-Ross shares with us her life's work experiences with death and dying persons and how dealing with our own death parallels with our everyday life choices. Death comes to us in small ways everyday. There are many things in life that we have to die to, inner growth depends on this. Dying to small things prepares us for the moment of bodily death. Our ego for one thing is the hardest to die to, how we love to be right and not give in to someone else's opinion, how we love to be recognized for our work, our successes, our education, our money, our home, cars etc. To let go of our ego takes a lifetime but it is well worth the effort and gives you acceptance and peace of soul. The practice of letting go in small things prepares you for the bigger decisions of life. Your life becomes less petty and more human, less superficial and more realized, less important and more compassionate. It is not an easy lesson but one worth working through the stages of death and dying. Victor Frankl in his book "Man's Search for Meaning " also show how finite is our existence. Anthony DeMello in his book Sadhana, a Way to God: Christian Exercises in Eastern Form reveals how important it is to detach ourselves from desire and also the Dalai Lama lives a life full of compassion although he has been exiled from his own country for over 35 years. To be or not to be that is the question.
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