#33 in Biography & memoir
From Here to Eternity
- 272
- Pages
- about 5 h
- Reading time
- NYT bestseller · 1 week on the list
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Our view
“From Here to Eternity” makes the world’s funeral customs fascinating and leaves its readers calmer about death. A working mortician, Doughty visits a Japanese columbarium of glowing Buddhas, a candlelit cemetery in Mexico and an open-air pyre in America, writing with curiosity, dark humour and a casual voice. She keeps pointing out that what one culture calls morbid is everyday practice in another. Some readers who came with no interest in the subject were won over.
The view of the BookRank editors, written from readers’ ratings and comments. It does not affect the score or the book’s place in a ranking.
About the book
As a practising mortician, Caitlin Doughty has long been fascinated by our pervasive terror of dead bodies. In From Here to Eternity she sets out in search of cultures unburdened by such fears. With curiosity and morbid humour, Doughty introduces us to inspiring death-care innovators, participates in powerful death practices almost entirely unknown in the West and explores new spaces for mourning - including a futuristic glowing-Buddha columbarium in Japan, a candlelit Mexican cemetery, and America's only open-air pyre. In doing so she expands our sense of what it means to treat the dead with 'dignity' and reveals unexpected possibilities for our own death rituals.
Where the score comes from
The sources average 8.5 across 172 ratings — not yet many, so the reader vote carries 54% of the weight and the rest pulls toward the Biography & memoir average of 8.1. That is how 8.3 comes out.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Library | 7.4 | 7 | 4% |
| Hardcover | 8.5 | 165 | 96% |
Frequently asked
How long is From Here to Eternity?
It has 272 pages — shorter than 68% of the ranked books in Biography & memoir.
In this book
Themes this book shares with others — each leads to the best books on it.
If you liked this
Same shelf — Biography & memoir — with scores between 7.6 and 8.3, closest to this book.
