A Review of On Death and Dying essays

A Review of On Death and Dying essays For my book review, I read On Death and Dying, by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. Dr. Kubler-Ross was the first person in her field to discuss the topic of death. Before 1969, death was considered a taboo. On Death and Dying is one of the most important psychological studies of the late twentieth century. The work grew out of her famous interdisciplinary seminar on death, life, and transition. In this paper, I give a comprehensive book review as well as integrate topics learned in class with Dr. Kubler-Ross' work. Like Piaget's look at developmental stages in children, there are also stages a person experiences on the journey toward death. These five stages are denial/isolation, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. On Death and Dying can be used as an aid to doctors, nurses, clergy, and the patient's family. Issues such as unfinished business, therapy, and hope for a cure for the terminally ill are discussed within this book. Each chapter uses interviews with patients to express the key factors surrounding their illness. Every patient knows that they are destined to die, and Kubler-Ross uses one-on-one therapy to help in the healing process. To understand the process of death, it helps to have had someone close to you decease. When I was nine, my grandmother had been suffering from a series of strokes and heart disease. She had also been a smoker for most of her life and was an alcoholic. The poor woman was not in such good health. I watched her go through these stages with pain in my eyes. Before the strokes and the heart disease struck, she was very much in denial of facing the inevitable. I remember her being angry and depressed about her situation, but did not like to express much emotion. In one section of the denial analysis, Kubler-Ross states that it "is usually a temporary defense and will soon be replaced by partial acceptance" (53). In relation to ...

When Having an Agent is Not a Good Thing

When Having an Agent is Not a Good Thing In 2007, I was a new author basking in the glow of the success of my first self-published book – a collection of short stories, that had won several awards and some serious press. My head was full of ideas for my next book. After completing the manuscript of my literary novel, I started shopping it around. Imagine my delight when several agents showed interest in it. I soon landed an agent at a very reputable New York agency with a proven track record. The young agent I signed up with was enthusiastic at the prospect of selling both my collection and the new novel I was working on. His head was full of ideas, but then came a series of â€Å"but firsts.† The first few rounds of editing were easy until a bombshell dropped. A senior agent at the agency quit and the bulk of that agent’s high profile clients came to the junior agent who suddenly lost all interest in me. He was no longer as responsive as he used to be, and it would take him days to respond to simple requests. After a few months of dodging my requests to seek updates, he hired an intern to work with me on doing the rest of the revisions. In a few days, I received a marked up copy from the intern that involved cutting 30 percent of my manuscript – to the point that pivotal moments in the story no longer made any sense. I put my foot down and refused to do those edits. The intern quickly backed off and the junior agent took charge again. After a few rounds of reasonable revision requests, I was promised that my book would be shopped around, except it never was. I was told it would be presented at book shows and that too never happened. After 18 months of waiting for my agent to fulfill his side of the obligations, I decided it was time to leave. I thanked him graciously and bowed out of the relationship.   Two months after that, I sold my novel to a reputable small traditional publisher In 2014, researchers from Washington and Lee University used an excerpt of Saffron Dreams to show that reading literary fiction like my novel can actually make someone less racist. The study was published in Basic and Applied Social Psychology. Interestingly enough, the passage that was selected for the study was one that my agent’s intern had marked for deletion. I leave the moral of the story to your imagination.