Suggested Reading

Closing Accounts

Hoping for a Good Death

How Do You Want to Die

Knocking on Heaven’s Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death, by Katy Butler

The Fault in Our Stars, by John Green

How We Die: Reflections of Life’s Final Chapter, by Sherwin Nuland, M.D.

What Kind of Life: The Limits of Medical Progress, by Daniel Callahan, Ph.D.

Fictional Death & The Modernist Enterprise, by Alan Warren Friedman, Ph.D.

Death’s Door: Modern Dying and the Ways We Grieve, by Sandra M. Gilbert

Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories that Heal, by Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D.

Being Mortal, by Atul Gawande, M.D.

Final Gifts: Understanding the Special Awareness, Needs and Communications of the Dying, by Maggie Callanan

False Hopes: Why America’s Quest for Perfect Health is a Recipe for Failure, by Daniel Callahan, Ph.D.

The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion

Blue Nights, by Joan Didion

Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson

The Long Life, by Helen Small

All the Living: A Novel, by C.E. Morgan

The Troubled Dream of Life: In Search of a Peaceful Death, by Daniel Callahan, Ph.D.

A Grief Observed, by C.S. Lewis

The Sense of an Ending, by Julian Barnes

Nothing to Be Frightened Of, by Julian Barnes

Who Dies?: An Investigation of Conscious Living and Conscious Dying, by Stephen and Ondrea Levine

Children and Death, by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

On Death and Dying: What the Dying Have to Teach Doctors, Nurses, Clergy, and Their Own Families, by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

The End of Your Life Book Club, by Will Schwalbe

What Dying People Want: Practical Wisdom for the End of Life, by David Kuhl

The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves, by Stephen Grosz

A Very Easy Death, by Simone De Beauvoir

Life After Death and Other Stories, by Susan Compo

Life Lessons: Two Experts on Death and Dying Teach us About the Mysteries of Life and Living, by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross and David Kessler

Dying Well: Peace and Possibilities at the End of Life, by Ira Byock, M.D.

Taming the Beloved Beast: How Medical Technology Costs are Destroying Our Health Care System, by Daniel Callahan, Ph.D.

Peaceful Journey: A Hospice Chaplain’s Guide to End of Life, by Matthew P. Binkewicz

Death, by Geoffrey Scarre

In Praise of Mortality, by Rainer Maria Rilke

A World Growing Old: The Coming Health Care Challenges, Edited by Daniel Callahan, Ruud H. J. ter Meulen and Eva Topinkova

Setting Limits: Medical Goals in an Aging Society, by Daniel Callahan, Ph.D.

Death and the Quest for Meaning, Edited by Stephen Strack

The Rest of Life: Three Novellas, by Mary Gordon

The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself, by Michael A. Singer

In Search of the Good: A Life in Bioethics, by Daniel Callahan, Ph.D.

Facing Death: Images, Insights, and Interventions, by Sandra L. Bertman

Twelve Patients: Life and Death at Bellevue Hospital, by Eric Manheimer, M.D.