Going in, I expected this to be anecdotes and stories from her time working in a crematorium. While there is a bit of that, this book is largely about her beliefs on how current American death practices are wrong and why we should change them.

I actually enjoyed a fair amount of the information. Discussing why we perform some typical rituals (like embalming) and how they came to be is interesting, same goes for when she discussed other culture's practices. And honestly, I actually agreed with many of her points.

But my big issue with this book was Caitlin Doughty herself. She came across as condescending and judgmental throughout the entire book. She preached about respecting other cultures' death practices (one example she brought up included cannibalizing the dead, and I did enjoy learning the why behind that), but then she'd turn around and use words like "lurid," "shameful," and "ignorant" when discussing American death practices.

She seemed to have this idea that the death practices that were comforting to her would be the same for everyone else. She said explicitly that if only other people could overcome their superstition, they could feel that confident, stable, comfort that she did in her personal death practices. Which seemed incredibly condescending to me, particularly for someone who talked so highly of respecting other people's cultures earlier in the book.

At one point she was discussing cremating babies, and said: "We logged their names, if they even had names. Often they would be labeled only as 'Baby Johnson' or 'Baby Sanchez.' It was sadder when they had full names, even when they were something terrible, like Caitlin spelled KateLynne." (page 92 in my edition) Imagine being the kind of person who mocks a dead infant's name. I think up until that point I was working so hard to give her the benefit of the doubt, maybe her sense of humor wasn't for me. But after that, I gave up.

It didn't get better. That might have been the worst example, but there were others of her making fun of the mother of a dead nine year old who tried to pay with the wrong credit card, wondering what kind of uncaring person booked cremation services online, saying people ought to shop around and do research like they do with cars and if they got ripped off that it was their own fault. Those were only the few I wrote down while reading, but there were many more.

In short, this book gave me an intense dislike of Caitlin Doughty as a person. I'd intended to watch her web series after reading, but I definitely won't be doing that. I wouldn't recommend this, but I'm the minority, so maybe I'm missing something that everyone else sees. I just thought this was pretty awful.