Customer Reviews

Facing Death: Images, Insights, and Interventions: A Handbook For Educators, Healthcare Professionals, And Counselors (Series in Death, Dying, and Bereavement)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Facing Death is an extraordinary resource for health care professionals and teachers, religious leaders, and for anyone either contemplating death in the abstract or facing it personally or as a friend or relative of someone with a fatal illness. It is an exquisite and empathic blend of reflect, review, verbal and visual images, and practical suggestions. It contains poignant quotes from poets, novelists, and families; powerful photographs of the interactions of family members with a dying grandparent; drawings by students asked to depict their feelings about death; and photographs of great and powerful works of visual art. The author uses the arts as stimuli to help patients and students acknowledge and explore their own feelings and behaviors. This book is enormously useful to me as a mortal middle-aged human being, as a physician caring for patients, and as a teacher.

Bertman has done an excellant job of jam packing a book full of paintings, sculpture, line art, cartoons and diagrams on the subject of death. Thoough her focus is mostly on dying the images are relevant, as well, in exploring mortality in general. Bertman has not made the mistake of making her work too theoretical or logocentric. She offers advice for creating art related to dying as well as advice on interpreting such art.
This book serves well in a death education course,or for the art therapist working in a hospice or similar setting as well as individuals who wish to explore ideas on death that are manifested in art.

As a medical educator, it can be difficult to find ways of helping students explore their emotional responses to suffering, death, and grief in ways that are safe and accessible, but challenging and useful. Dr. Bertman's book has turned out to be exactly what I was looking for. This collection of visual representations with explanatory text is a great starting place for discussions about the issues of life, death, and illness for learners at any level, from children to patients and families, to health care practitioners.

Dr. Bertman's "Facing Death"  has helped me and my clients.  A new favorite, I refer to it often. As a therapist, I find it to be the most valuable relevent addition to my library.   Loaded with tools and comforting observations made by children and  adults of many walks of life, we're shown the relevance of the grieving process to us all regardless of our ethnic background, sosioeconomic status, or age.  I share these quotations and observations with my clients.

As an individual,  trying to make sence of my own grieving process, I find  the book to be a refreshing  sorce of  emotional comfort. It's full of theraputic gifts.  Were I currently teaching I would insist my students read this book.

I thought the book gave an excelent view of living with death. I got the book to help me with my studdies and I found it very usefull.