Bad Hair Daysby Pamela Bone
Melbourne Uni Press
Price: $32.95
ISBN: 0522853692
Pamela Bone was a prominent newspaper journalist and columnist when in 2004 she was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a cancer of the bone marrow that can be treated but not cured. Dry-Eyed, but often darkly humorous, Bad Hair Days describes a journey many baby boomers make working and meeting the demands of everyday life, minus hair and under the influence of chemo, while, outside the front door, the world seems to be going to hell in a hand basket.
Available everywhere
A Good Deathby Syme, Rodney
Melbourne Uni Press
Price: $32.95
ISBN: 0522855032
Rodney Syme’s extraordinarily candid and controversial account of the many terminally ill people who he has assisted to end their lives. Over the last 30 years Syme, at first clandestinely and now publicly, has challenged the law on voluntary euthanasia, risking prosecution in doing so. He again risks prosecution for writing this book. A Good Death is a moving journey with those who came to Rodney Syme for help and a meditation on what it means to confront death in our culture. It is also a doctor’s personal story about the moral dilemmas and ethical choices he faces working within the grey areas of the law.
In A Good Death Rodney Syme argues for the end of the unofficial “conspiracy” of silence within the medical profession and the decriminalisation of voluntary euthanasia in Australia. Through Syme’s determination to tell the stories of those who he has assisted to die with dignity, A Good Death also draws wider lessons of value for those who find themselves in a similar situation.
Available Dymocks, Gleebooks and online
My life as a surgeon
Making the Cut: A Surgeon’s Stories of Life on the Edge
by Mohamed Khadra
Random House, $34.95
ISBN 97817416667325
Mohamed Khadra, surgeon, now professor, tells why he gave up surgery after a bout with cancer. He says “Every surgeon makes 10, 15, 20 decisions a day that fundamentally affect people’s lives, and we make those without flinching, without real thought for the gravity of each of those decisions,” he explains. “If we were burdened with that gravity we’d almost lose our ability to make that decision … It’s a large part of why I’ve given up surgery.”
Khadra had watched his mother die slowly, and he watched so many others desperately resuscitated, plugged in to machines, so they could suffer some more before their inevitable deaths. Everything was geared to saving lives with no regard for consequences. A figure he comes back to constantly is that 70 per cent of the health budget is spent on people in the last six months of their lives.
“Why do we have so many people waiting years for hernia operations while we are spending an enormous amount of technological power on people in the last 30 days of their life? What are we gaining from all that? I don’t have the answers but society needs to talk about it so the health professionals get some guidance.”
To be a surgeon is to stand, without flinching, in the sea of human suffering and use one’s entire resource of knowledge, skill and intelligence to battle it. An intern makes his first cut and is ridiculed by his tutor.
An old woman is brought back to life against her will, only for the unexpected to strike a week later. A notorious surgeon is driven crazy by a massive brain tumour. The mother of a leukaemia-ridden child is driven to desperation.
In this compelling and beautifully written impressionistic memoir, Mohamed Khadra recounts stories from his life as a surgeon, from the gruelling years of training to the debilitating sleepless nights on call. He looks back at the doctors and patients who shaped his career; at the endless stream of humanity - courageous, pitiful, admirable and dislikeable - who passed under his knife, as he recalls shocking tales of mistakes in theatre and the shattered lives of doctors defeated by the stresses of the job.
Documenting the damaging politics in our healthcare system, the soul-destroying choices made for patients and the misplaced hope so common in the face of death, his dramatic account of a surgical life shows what happens when extraordinary events overtake everyday lives - including, even, his own.
Available Dymocks, Gleebooks and online
Good Life, Good Death
Memoir of how a writer became a euthanasia advocate
by Derek Humphry
$12.00 (PDF eBook) • 2008
Not available in paperback
ISBN 0976828332
Good Life, Good Death covers seventy-eight years of an eventful life. Ranging across his childhood in a broken home, with a father in prison, a mother who ran away to Australia the book relates his remarkable experiences in journalism and includes outstanding interviews with famous people, and his struggle against racism. Derek immigrated to the USA at age forty-eight.
The second half of the book deals with his impact on the right-to-die movement in America, beginning and building the Hemlock Society, and pioneering the Oregon Death With Dignity Act (1994), the only such physician-assisted suicide law in North America.
Derek is president of the Euthanasia Research & Guidance Organization, chairman of the advisory board of the Final Exit Network (successor to the now defunct Hemlock), and an adviser to the World Federation of Right to Die Societies, of which he has been president.
http://www.goodlifegooddeath.com/good-life-good-death-book.html
Assisted Dying: Reflections on the Need for Law Reformby Sheila A.M. McLean
Routledge-Cavendish
ISBN: 978-1-84472-054-5
Go to Google Book Search to find out where to buy this book.
Read review by Romaine Rutnam of this book here.
Assisted Dying explores the law relating to euthanasia and assisted suicide, tracing its development from prohibition through to the laissez faire attitude adopted in a number of countries in the 21st Century.
This book provides an in-depth critique of the arguments surrounding legislative control of such practices and particularly looks into the regulatory role of the state. In the classical tradition of libertarianism, the state is generally presumed to have a remit to intervene where an individual’s actions threaten another, rather than harm the individuals themselves. This arguably leaving a question mark over the state’s determined intervention, in the UK and elsewhere, into the private and highly personal choices of individual to die rather than live.
The perceived role of the state in safeguarding the moral values of the community and the need for third party involvement in assisted suicide and euthanasia could be thought to raise these practices to a different level. These considerations may be in direct conflict with the so called right to die espoused by some individuals and groups within the community. However this book will argue that the state’s interests are and should be second to the interests that the people themselves have in choosing their own death.
A Social History of Dying
by Allan Kellehear
La Trobe University, Victoria.
ISBN-13: 9780521694292
Go to Gleebooks to buy this book OR Google Book Search to find out where to buy this book.
Our experiences of dying have been shaped by ancient ideas about death and social responsibility at the end of life. From Stone Age ideas about dying as otherworld journey to the contemporary Cosmopolitan Age of dying in nursing homes, Allan Kellehear takes the reader on a two million year journey of discovery that covers the major challenges we will all eventually face: anticipating, preparing, taming and timing for our eventual deaths. This is a major review of the human and clinical sciences literature about human dying conduct. The historical approach of this book places our recent images of cancer dying and medical care in broader historical, epidemiological and global context. Professor Kellehear argues that we are witnessing a rise in shameful forms of dying. It is not cancer, heart disease or medical science that presents modern dying conduct with its greatest moral tests, but rather poverty, ageing and social exclusion.
The Living End—The Future of Death, Aging and Immortality by Guy Brown
Publisher: Macmillan Science
ISBN 9780230517578
Go to Gleebooks to buy this book OR Google Book Search to find out where to buy this book.
The decline of infections, starvation, heart attack, and stroke has allowed people to reach extreme old age--and ushered in disability, dementia, and degenerative disease, with profound consequences for the self and society. In chapters echoing Dante's nine circles of hell, Dr. Guy Brown explores these vital issues at various levels, from the cell, to the whole body, to society and how all this new medical technology affects the meaning of death. He tracks the seismic shifts in the causes and character of death that are rocking medicine and reveals how technological innovations, such as cloning and electronic interfaces, hint at new modes of "survival" after death.
Swimming In A Sea Of Death Subtitle: A Son's Memoir
by David Rieff
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Hardcover
ISBN: 0743299469 9780743299466
Go to Gleebooks to buy this book OR Google Book Search to find out where to buy this book.
Both a memoir & an investigation, this is David Rieff's brave, passionate & unsparing witness of the last nine months of his mother, Susan Sontag's, life. From her initial diagnosis to her death, the book is both an intensely personal portrait of the relationship between a mother & a son, and a reflection on what it is like to try to help someone gravely ill in her fight to go on living and, when the time comes, to die with dignity.
Last modified: Monday 21 July 2008. (15:34)