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"&#8220;A thoroughly researched and compelling mix of personal narrative and hard-nosed reporting that captures just how flawed care at the end of life has become&#8221; (Abraham Verghese,The New York TimesBook Review).This bestselling memoir&#8212;hailed a &#8220;triumph&#8221; by The New York Times&#8212;ponders the &#8220;Good Death&#8221; and the forces within medicine that stand in its way.Award-winning journalist Katy Butler was living thousands of miles from her aging parents when the call came: her beloved seventy-nine-year-old father had suffered a crippling stroke. Katy and her mother joined the more than 28 million Americans who are shepherding loved ones through their final declines.Doctors outfitted her father with a pacemaker, which kept his heart going while doing nothing to prevent a slide into dementia, near-blindness, and misery. When he said, &#8220;I&#8217;m living too long,&#8221; mother and daughter faced wrenching moral questions. Where is the line between saving a life and prolonging a dying? When do you say to a doctor, &#8220;Let my loved one go?&#8221;When doctors refused to disable the pacemaker, condemning her father to a lingering death, Butler set out to understand why. Her quest had barely begun when her mother, faced with her own grave illness, rebelled against her doctors, refused open-heart surgery, and met death the old-fashioned way: head-on.Part memoir, part medical history, and part spiritual guide, Knocking on Heaven&#8217;s Door is a map through the labyrinth of a broken medical system. Technological medicine, obsessed with maximum longevity, is creating more suffering than it prevents. Butler chronicles the rise of Slow Medicine, a movement bent on reclaiming the &#8220;Good Deaths&#8221; our ancestors prized. In families, hospitals, and the public sphere, this visionary memoir isinspiring the difficult conversations we must have to light the path to a better way of death.&#8220;A lyrical meditation written with extraordinary beauty and sensitivity&#8221; (San Francisco Chronicle)."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://books.simonandschuster.com/Knocking-on-Heavens-Door/Katy-Butler/9781451641981>