Mortal Dilemmas

Anthropologist Donald Joralemon asks whether America is really, as many scholars claim, a death-denying culture that prefers to quarantine the sick in hospitals and the elderly in nursing homes. His answer is a reasoned "e;no."e; In his view, Americans are merely struggling to find cultural scripts for the exceptional conditions of dying that our social world and medical technologies have thrust upon us. The book: is written in the first-person for a broad audience by a senior anthropologist, making it an authoritative yet accessible textbook for courses on death and dying and American culture; includes contemporary debates about highly visible cases, the definition of death, the status of human remains, aging, and the medicalization of grief; demonstrates persuasively that arguments over death and dying are in fact arguments about what it means to be human in modern America.