Final Rights: Reclaiming the American Way of Death

Decades after Jessica Mitford stunned America with vivid accounts of corruption and abuse in the death industry, not much has improved. Families are manipulated into buying expensive goods and services they don't need or want. Prepaid funeral money vanishes into thin air. Body parts are sold on the black market. Eight states force families to pay a funeral director even if they conduct a home funeral with no need for help. But a consumer movement is no awakening, and Americans are asserting their rights over a key part of life, just as they did in the past with the natural childbirth and hospice movements. The two most prominent leaders of that movement are the authors of this book: Joshua Slocum, executive director of Funeral Consumers Alliance, and Lisa Carlson, executive director of Funeral Ethics Organization. Here they join forces to expose wrongdoing, inform consumers of their rights, and propose legal reforms. The book includes state-by-state summaries of laws, regulations, services, and consumer concerns.

• Grave Matters: A Journey Through the Modern Funeral Industry to a Natural Way of Burial
• The Green Burial Guidebook: Everything You Need to Plan an Affordable, Environmentally Friendly Burial
• Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
• Confessions of a Funeral Director: How the Business of Death Saved My Life
• Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory
• Reimagining Death: Stories and Practical Wisdom for Home Funerals and Green Burials
• From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death
• Home Funeral Ceremonies: A primer to honor the dying and the dead with reverence, light-heartedness and grace
• The American Way of Death Revisited
• Accompanying the Dying: Practical, Heart-Centered Wisdom for End-of-Life Doulas and Health Care Advocates