San Antonio College Library

"There is a vast literature on death and dying, but there are few reliable accounts of the ways in which we die. The intimate account of how various diseases take away life, offered in How We Die, is not meant to prompt horror or terror but to demythologize the process of dying to help us rid ourselves of that fear of the terra incognita." "Though the avenues of death - AIDS, cancer, heart attack, Alzheimer's, accident, and stroke - are common, each...

"In his most ambitious work yet, Shermer sets out to discover what drives humans' belief in life after death, focusing on recent scientific attempts to achieve immortality by radical life extentionists, extropians, transhumanists, cryonicists, and mind-uploaders, along with utopians who have attempted to create heaven on earth. For millennia, religions have concocted numerous manifestations of heaven and the afterlife, the place where souls go after...

"A funeral home director discusses the environmental impact of common burial practices and provides ecologically sound alternatives that minimize the use of chemicals and non-biodegradable materials; also covers the financial and legal aspects of green burial methods"--

Explores death and the afterlife from lighthearted philosophical, theological, and psychological perspectives that consider that death may not be such a pessimism-inducing state.

On a warm spring evening in South Los Angeles, a young man was shot and killed on a sidewalk minutes away from his home, one of hundreds of young men slain in Los Angeles every year. His assailant ran down the street, jumped into an SUV, and vanished, hoping to join the vast majority of killers in American cities who are never arrested for their crimes. But as soon as the case was assigned to Detective John Skaggs, the odds shifted. Here is the kaleidoscopic...

Science writer Dick Teresi examines how death is determined by the medical community and explores organ trafficking, brain death, and near-death experiences.

MED This collection of essays by noted academics provides compelling arguments for and against physician-assisted suicide. As in the Report of the Committee on Physician-Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia (Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior, v. 26, suppl., 1996), Weir (director of the Program in Medical Ethics and Medical Humanities, Univ. of Iowa Coll. of Medicine) takes no position on physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia but emphasizes the...

"The word "orphan" might not seem to apply to a fifty-three-year-old woman. Yet this is exactly how Sandra feels as she finds herself motherless, alone like "a glove left behind at the bus station." What just might save her is her search for someone else gone missing: Marie, the black-and-white cat of her friend, Roz, who ran off the day they arrived from Tacoma. As Sandra and Roz scour the streets of San Antonio, posting flyers and asking everywhere,...