San Antonio College Library

An intimate portrait of a group of very different suicide bombers working for Al Qaeda in Syria. From the Saudi who loves singing and fried chicken, to a 26-year-old white British convert who worries a lot about his new wife, this remarkable film embeds with an unlikely bunch of "martyrdom seekers", each waiting for their turn to go on a final mission, known by Jihadis as 'Dugma'.

"Award-winning novelist and poet Gayle Brandeis's wrenching memoir of her complicated family history and her mother's suicide. Gayle Brandeis's mother disappeared just after Gayle gave birth to her youngest child. Several days later, her body was found: she had hanged herself in the utility closet of a Pasadena parking garage. In this searing, formally inventive memoir, Gayle describes the dissonance between being a new mother, a sweet-smelling infant...

"What is death? Do people survive death? What do we mean when we say that someone is "dying"? Presenting a clear and engaging discussion of the classic philosophical questions surrounding death, this book studies the great metaphysical and moral problems of death, concluding with a novel consequentialist theory about the morality of killing, applying it to such thorny practical issues as abortion, suicide, and euthanasia. Book jacket."--Jacket.

If you scrolled through the Instagram feed of 19-year-old Maddy Holleran, you would see a perfect life: a freshman at an Ivy League school, recruited for the track team, who was also beautiful, popular, and fiercely intelligent. This was a girl who succeeded at everything she tried, and who was only getting started. But when Maddy began her long-awaited college career, her parents noticed something was different. Previously indefatigable, Maddy became...

From Waco to Heaven's Gate, the past decade has seen its share of cult tragedies. But none has been quite so dramatic or compelling as the Jonestown massacre, in which the Reverend Jim Jones and 913 of his disciples of the Peoples Temple perished. Deborah Layton had been a member for seven years when she left Peoples Temple headquarters in San Francisco, California, for Jonestown, Guyana, the promised land nestled deep in the South American jungle....

Harry Crosby was the godson of J.P. Morgan, a friend of Ernest Hemingway, and member of the Lost Generation. Living in Paris in the twenties and directing the Black Sun Press, which published James Joyce among others, Crosby was at the center of the wild life, single-minded in his devotion to the creation and destruction inherent in art. Drugs, drink, sex, gambling, the deliberate derangement of the senses in the pursuit of transcendent revelation:...

"A series of interviews on the topics of end-of-life care and the right-to-die movement"-- In a series of interviews with terminally ill patients, with physicians, ethicists, spouses, relatives, and representatives of whose who vigorously oppose the right-to-die movement, Rehm presents the arguments both for and against assisted suicide. In giving voice to those who are personally linked to the realities of medical aid in dying, she provides full...

Examines the life of Fanny Wollstonecraft, the first daughter of notorious feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, by an American lover, discussing her place in the household of her stepfather William Godwin, and looking at her relationship with her famous sister Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, her dashed hopes for romance with Mary's eventual husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, and her suicide at the age of twenty-two.

Zoe Carter's busy life on the West Coast with her husband and daughters takes an unexpected detour when her mother Margaret decides she wants to "end things." Tired of living with Parkinson's disease, Margaret declares she is no longer willing to go where the illness is taking her. Zoe does what she can to convince her mother to abandon her plans. But for nearly a year, Margaret will talk of nothing else. Shuttling between her family in California...

In the late 1980s, 61-year-old former pathologist Dr. Jack Kevorkian launched a crusade to provide what he considered a humane and dignified option for the terminally ill--assisted suicide. Aided by his loyal friend Neal Nicol, and his older sister Margo Janus, Kevorkian begins offering his "death counseling" services to a grateful and burgeoning clientele. He earns the support of Hemlock Society activist Janet Good and the wrath of the county prosecutor's...