Smoke Gets in Your Eyes
And Other Lessons from the Crematory
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4.6 • 488 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
In this "morbid and illuminating" (Entertainment Weekly) New York Times bestseller that launched the death positive movement, a young mortician goes behind the scenes of her curious profession.
Armed with a degree in medieval history and a flair for the macabre, Caitlin Doughty took a job at a crematory and turned morbid curiosity into her life’s work. She cared for bodies of every color, shape, and affliction, and became an intrepid explorer in the world of the dead. In this best-selling memoir, brimming with gallows humor and vivid characters, she marvels at the gruesome history of undertaking and relates her unique coming-of-age story with bold curiosity and mordant wit. By turns hilarious, dark, and uplifting, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes reveals how the fear of dying warps our society and "will make you reconsider how our culture treats the dead" (San Francisco Chronicle).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this valiant effort Doughty, a Hawaii-born LA mortician and creator of the web series "Ask a Mortician," uses her work as a crematorium operator at the family-owned Westwind Cremation and Burial in Oakland, Calif., to challenge the way we view death. Having studied medieval history in college, Doughty found an early job with the real deal: feeding the two huge "retorts," the cremation machines in the Westwind warehouse, with corpses some not so fresh retrieved by order from private homes or, more often, from hospitals, nursing homes, and the coroner's office. Doughty was eager to prove her mettle, and offered to do any number of odious tasks, such as shaving corpses, or otherwise helping Bruce the embalmer prepare them for the bereaved family's viewing: pumping them with the "salmon pink cocktail" of formaldehyde and alcohol, wielding the trusty trocar, and sewing closed mouths and eyelids. Her descriptions about picking dead babies up from the hospital prove particularly difficult to read. Nonetheless, Doughty does stare death in the face, by tracking down numerous ancient rituals (she observes approvingly how some Eastern cultures still participate in the preparing of the body), pursuing fascinating new words such as "desquamation" and "bubblating" (both refer to excess fluids), and celebrating the natural function of decomposition.
Customer Reviews
S. Raddohl
A guide through the eyes and experiences of a young woman whose wit and wisdom on death, provokes thought and preparation for each and everyone of us and our inevitable mortality.
Intriguing!
I throughly enjoyed reading this book. I learned so many things about cremation and death in general. Death shouldn’t be something taboo to talk about, death is a natural process and I think she explained it very beautifully. This is definitely worth a read!
I love the stranger things in life, & this book is one of them💀
Such an amazing book! I love how Catherine Doughty has such a dark sense of humor about such a taboo subject in American culture.