A Few Months to Live:
Different Paths to Life's End
by Jana Staton, Roger Shuy & Ira Byock
Georgetown University Press, May 2001
(A participant-observer study of dying people and their caregivers.)
358 pages;  6X9; LC 00-047671
cloth, ISBN 0-87840-840-1, $70; paperback, ISBN 0-87840-841-X, $26.95

A Few Months to Live describes what dying is like from the perspectives on nine terminally ill individuals and their caregivers. Documenting a unique study of end-of-life experiences (The Missoula Demonstration Project) that included detailed conversations in home care settings, the book focuses on how participants lived their daily lives, understood their illnesses, coped with symptoms (especially pain), and searched for meaning or spiritual growth in their final months of life. The accounts are presented largely in the participants' own words, illuminating both the medical and non-medical challenges that arose from the time each learned the "bad news" through their final days of life and memorial services.   
Topics include palliative care, quality of life, financial hardship, grief and loss, and communications with healthcare personnel.            

Reviews  
 
"A minute, unsparing, yet tender study that gets closer to the thoughts and feelings of the dying (and those around them) that any comparable research known to me... A very important book, which must be compared to Sherwin Nuland's How We Die."
Oliver Sacks, author of Awakenings

"A very important book that is critical reading or anyone interested in end-of-life care. The authors, using the techniques of quantitative research, have  provided a way for the dying and those who care about them to speak for themselves about the value of hospice care and how to improve it."
Phyllis R. Silverman, Ph.D., Massachusetts General Hospital,
Harvard Medical School    

"A useful introduction to the realities of hospice care and caregiving, problems of delivering service... their generous quotations of study participants makes people's troubles and satisfactions vividly real."
Arthur W. Frank, Ph.D., author of At the Will of he Body and The Wounded Storyteller

LA Times  August 20, 2001  Reviewer:  SHARI ROAN         
Missoulian  May 21, 2001    Reviewer:  GINNY MERRIAM

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