Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Two non-fiction books about death: one very serious, one much less so

Crisis in the Red Zone: The Story of the Deadliest Ebola Outbreak in History, and of the Outbreaks to Come by Richard Preston

Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs?: Big Questions from Tiny Mortals About Death by Caitlin Doughty

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(4 stars) Crisis in the Red Zone: The Story of the Deadliest Ebola Outbreak in History, and of the Outbreaks to Come by Richard Preston My best friend and I were obsessed with The Hot Zone in high school. I wrote a damn book report on it at one point. The combination of the horror of the disease and the power of the science fighting it struck a chord with us (more so with her maybe — she’s a scientist now!) and we continued reading books […]

Living the Good Death

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes And Other Lessons from the Crematory by Caitlin Doughty

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I acquired this book. I have no idea how, or where it came from, but it’s been living on my bookshelf for three years. Maybe it was hubby’s? Maybe someone left it at our house? It got on the shelf somehow, but I don’t remember putting it there. The only clue to its origins is a receipt I found tucked in the back.  It was purchased at the Newark Airport in 2015 along with a book about biology. I did not travel anywhere in 2015, […]

Each person is a new adventure and some of those adventures are disturbing

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory by Caitlin Doughty

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This book, is a very practical and blunt statement about the part of life people don’t want to think about. People die, and when that happens someone has to take the time and the care to prepare the body. You will learn quickly if this book is for you or if it isn’t. It is gross, and it has a morbid sense of humor that is obviously needed to get through a job where death is in your face every day, sometimes quite literally. Some […]

“All that surrounds us comes from death, every part of every city, and every part of every person.” (CBR10Bingo)

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Two years ago I read and truly enjoyed Caitlin Doughty’s debut book, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, which chronicled her journey from someone curious about the business of death into an advocate for seeking out what she terms “the good death” and changing the funerary business as it is now in the United States.  Besides being an interesting story about her life, the book is basically a treatise about making death a part of your life, of staring down your fears and accepting that death […]

What We Can Learn About Death From Others

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Best for: Anyone interested in death and mourning rituals from around the world. In a nutshell: Author and funeral home owner Caitlin Doughty follows up her bestseller “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes” with a look at different funeral and mourning rituals in an attempt to get those in some parts of the West who may be in denial about death to think about it differently. Line that sticks with me: I’m going to cheat here and offer two: 1. “Cailin, can you smile a little, […]

Just the Right Combination of Humor, Insight, and Death.

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Ah, here we go. I tore through this book over two mornings ingesting every detail Ms. Doughty had to offer about her life and what her time working in crematories and mortuaries has taught her. Perhaps it was a kinship I felt with a similar academic mind craving information. Perhaps it was my previously mentioned interest in forensics, death, and disaster. But whatever it was, this book simply worked for me in a way that my previous read did not.  Perhaps the best way to […]



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