REVIEW: Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory, by Caitlin Doughty

Do your favorite stories include a rotting corpse? Does part of you wish you had become a mortician, funeral director, or embalmer? Have you spent hours thinking about bodies decomposing in the ground, or smoldering in the fire of cremation? Yes? Then Smoke Gets in Your Eyes is required reading.

Doughty’s fascination with death led her, at twenty-three, to a full-time position as a cremation operator at Westwind Cremation & Burial in San Francisco, where she experienced the realities of death and decay juxtaposed with the death industry’s enabling of our death-denying culture. Through Doughty’s descriptive essays, readers can follow along — into the cremation chamber, the embalming room, the hospital morgue, and with loved ones of the deceased.

“It’s more dangerous to your health to fly on an airplane than it is to be in the same room as a corpse.” Doughty contends that we cannot appreciate our lives without an acceptance of aging, disease, death, and decay. She encourages families to care for their own dead, to eschew embalming — which isn’t necessary for disease prevention – and to take the time to say goodbye.

– Jennifer McQueen, Mount Pleasant Regional Library

Find this and similar titles from Charleston County Public Library. This item available as a book. To learn more or place a hold, visit www.ccpl.org or call 843-805-6930.

A hearty Charleston Currents tip of the hat to reviewer Delores Schweitzer of the Poe/Sullivan’s Island branch of the library. She was the February winner of a pair of tickets from a drawing for library reviewers. Enjoy Magnolia Plantation and Gardens!