2020: Eh. This book gets a very mediocre "meh" from me.

I took a class called "Death and Dying" during my senior year of college, and I was hoping that this book would emulate some of what I found there. The class was provocative, challenging, and covered a wide range of beliefs about death. We explored both traditions for the burials and funerals, and what various cultures believed happened to our souls after we die. It was informative and inspiring.

In contrast, this book basically tells the story of several members of the class, and their terribly tragic lives. Sure, death has touched their lives repeatedly, but it comes across as tragedy porn in the book, rather than an informative and thought-provoking look at HOW death has touched their lives. The teacher of this course is Dr. Norma Bowe, who is an angelic soul trying to save all of New Jersey. No time is spent explaining how Dr. Bowe finances any of her miracle endeavors. I'd never even heard of Kean University; I'm not sure how much a tenured professor actually makes there, but it seems a little impossible for her to have achieved everything she writes about.

The book is overall poorly written. There are misplaced modifiers all over the place: "I met one of the survivors of the US Airways flight that had landed in the Hudson River at a Dunkin' Donuts near his home in Long Island". It took me three tried to read this sentence and realize that the plane had not crashed into a restaurant. It's also disorienting to be reading about the students' lives, and then to be reminded at the end that the author had also taken the class. This would have been a much stronger book if she included more of her own journey through the class. I also can't forgive her use of "transsexual" to describe one of the students (this book was written in 2014. You knew better.)

I'd recommend picking up a copy of Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death or Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's On Death and Dying before I'd spend any time on this book.