Honor your loved ones and the earth by choosing practical, spiritual, and eco-friendly after-death care Natural, legal, and innovative after-death care options are transforming the paradigm of the existing funeral industry, helping families and communities recover their instinctive capacity to care for a loved one after death and do so in creative and healing ways. Reimagining Death offers stories and guidance for home funeral vigils, advance after-death care directives, green burials, and conscious dying. When we bring art and beauty, meaningful ritual, and joy to ease our loss and sorrow, we are greening the gateway of death and returning home to ourselves, to the wisdom of our bodies, and to the earth.

Written by a sociologist and a journalist, The Death of an American Jewish Community: A Tragedy of Good Intentions recounts the death of a Boston community once home to 90,000 Jews residing among African-Americans and white ethnics. The frightening personal testimonies and blatant evidence of manipulated housing prices illustrate how inadequate government regulation of banks can contribute to ethnic conflict and lives destroyed. “There were no winners,” the authors warn. Hillel Levine and Lawrence Harmon believe that their findings may be true for American cities in general. Had we learned from what went wrong in Boston — blockbusting by a group of banks, federal programs promoting mortgages to people unable to afford them, real estate brokers seeking quick profits —, perhaps the 2008 nationwide real estate meltdown could have been anticipated. The lessons from this book are essential for students of ethnic relations and urban affairs. “This candid, disturbing, and highly readable book recounts how Boston’s working-class Jewish neighborhoods were transformed into economically devastated black ghettoes.” — The New Yorker “Bankers and real-estate brokers still shape the dynamics of daily life in our fragile urban neighborhoods. Levine and Harmon movingly capture the human side of this often destructive process in their story of redlining and blockbusting in Boston during the 1960s. But their book is more than history. It is a lesson about how to understand and improve our cities and neighborhoods, today and in the future.” — Raymond L. Flynn, Mayor of Boston, President, U.S. Conference of Mayors “Levine and Harmon are sympathetic to the goals of racial integration but are indignant over the brutality and unfairness that accompanied these orchestrations. Bankers and politicians are indicted here by elaborate court evidence and by supplementary research cited by the authors, who use their insiders’ passion (Harmon was born and raised in Dorchester) and professional expertise to forever preserve the corned-beef flavor of old Blue Hill Avenue. As much an elegiac memory book of old Jewish Boston as a searing indictment against her killers.” — Kirkus Reviews “Combines the rigor of good scholarship with the obsessive curiosity of good journalism” — J. Anthony Lukas, Author of Common Ground “What keeps a community alive? What are the social and historical forces that shape or stifle its aspirations? When does a community soar and when does it yield to resignation? These and other questions take on an urgency of their own in Hillel Levine and Lawrence Harmon’s perceptive, brilliant, and disturbing inquiry.” — Elie Wiesel, University Professor and Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities, Boston University “Levine and Harmon have written a prophetic indictment of the real estate speculation and elite indifference that, along with black crimes, destroyed Boston’s most vibrant Jewish neighborhoods. Have the courage to take their terrible journey; you will not return unchanged!” — Jim Sleeper, Author of The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York “This engagingly written and brilliantly illuminating portrait of the destruction of a vibrant Jewish community radically revises our understanding of the process of neighborhood change. The authors also break new ground in portraying the critical role of social class in American life and the powerful, if unconscious, class bias of Jewish communal leaders.” — Charles E. Silberman, Author of A Certain People: American Jews and Their Lives Today

This study is an exploration of the religious beliefs, attitudes, traditions and rituals of a British hindu community, with respect to dying, death and bereavement. The observations of this community are compared with material obtained during three months of fieldwork in India and ethnographic sources. The primary focus of this study is on individual Hindus, seen in the context of their family and community: their beliefs, experiences and perceptions about death, and their reactions to the changes that take place. It also examines the process of adaptation and change in the death rituals and the role of the pandits in maintaining continuity. The first part of this study sets the context, introducing the issues confronting Hindus facing death and bereavement in Britain. It discusses theoretical issues in a multicultural study as well as beliefs about death and life after death. In the second part, Hindu ritual practices around death are explored, using a model of nine stages from preparation for death to the final post-mortem and annual ancestral rituals. The third part explores the social and psychological dimensions of death, grief and mourning, the implications of death in hospital and the professional and bureaucratic issues which affect Hindu deaths in Britain. The social aspects of mourning are discussed, with reference to pollution, the role of the family and community, young people and widows. Finally, the author examines the implications of social changes for British Hindus and for those who are involved with them in the caring professions.

For more than a century, the term "Main Street" has conjured up nostalgic images of American small-town life. Representations exist all around us, from fiction and film to the architecture of shopping malls and Disneyland. All the while, the nation has become increasingly diverse, exposing tensions within this ideal. In The Death and Life of Main Street, Miles Orvell wrestles with the mythic allure of the small town in all its forms, illustrating how Americans continue to reinscribe these images on real places in order to forge consensus about inclusion and civic identity, especially in times of crisis. Orvell underscores the fact that Main Street was never what it seemed; it has always been much more complex than it appears, as he shows in his discussions of figures like Sinclair Lewis, Willa Cather, Frank Capra, Thornton Wilder, Margaret Bourke-White, and Walker Evans. He argues that translating the overly tidy cultural metaphor into real spaces--as has been done in recent decades, especially in the new urbanist planned communities of Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Andres Duany--actually diminishes the communitarian ideals at the center of this nostalgic construct. Orvell investigates the way these tensions play out in a variety of cultural realms and explores the rise of literary and artistic traditions that deliberately challenge the tropes and assumptions of small-town ideology and life.

The industrial-port belt of Los Angeles is home to eleven of the top twenty oil refineries in California, the largest ports in the country, and those "racist monuments" we call freeways. In this uncelebrated corner of "La La Land" through which most of America's goods transit, pollution is literally killing the residents. In response, a grassroots movement for environmental justice has grown, predominated by Asian and undocumented Latin@ immigrant women who are transforming our political landscape—yet we know very little about these change makers. In Refusing Death, Nadia Y. Kim tells their stories, finding that the women are influential because of their ability to remap politics, community, and citizenship in the face of the country's nativist racism and system of class injustice, defined not just by disproportionate environmental pollution but also by neglected schools, surveillance and deportation, and political marginalization. The women are highly conscious of how these harms are an assault on their bodies and emotions, and of their resulting reliance on a state they prefer to avoid and ignore. In spite of such challenges and contradictions, however, they have developed creative, unconventional, and loving ways to support and protect one another. They challenge the state's betrayal, demand respect, and, ultimately, refuse death.

"Drawing on a rich trove of documents never before available to scholars, the author sketches the early pioneers, their daily lives, their beliefs, and their struggles to survive and prosper in this isolated mountain community, now within the confines of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. In moving detail this book brings to life an isolated mountain community, its struggle to survive, and the tragedy of its demise." -- Provided by publisher.

Life after Death Row examines the post-incarceration struggles of individuals who have been wrongly convicted of capital crimes, sentenced to death, and subsequently exonerated. Saundra D. Westervelt and Kimberly J. Cook present eighteen exonerees’ stories, focusing on three central areas: the invisibility of the innocent after release, the complicity of the justice system in that invisibility, and personal trauma management. Contrary to popular belief, exonerees are not automatically compensated by the state or provided adequate assistance in the transition to post-prison life. With no time and little support, many struggle to find homes, financial security, and community. They have limited or obsolete employment skills and difficulty managing such daily tasks as grocery shopping or banking. They struggle to regain independence, self-sufficiency, and identity. Drawing upon research on trauma, recovery, coping, and stigma, the authors weave a nuanced fabric of grief, loss, resilience, hope, and meaning to provide the richest account to date of the struggles faced by people striving to reclaim their lives after years of wrongful incarceration.