Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory

"Morbid and illuminating" (Entertainment Weekly)—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).

• From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death
• The Organ Shortage Crisis in America: Incentives, Civic Duty, and Closing the Gap
• Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs?: Big Questions from Tiny Mortals About Death
• Confessions of a Funeral Director: How the Business of Death Saved My Life
• Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places
• Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner
• Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
• The American Way of Death Revisited
• The Victorian Book of the Dead (The Ghosts of the Past 4)
• Final Rights: Reclaiming the American Way of Death