“A thoroughly researched and compelling mix of personal narrative and hard-nosed reporting that captures just how flawed care at the end of life has become” (Abraham Verghese,<I> </I><I>T</I><I>he New York Times</I> <I>Book Review</I>).<br><br>This bestselling memoir—hailed a “triumph” by <I>The New York Times</I>—ponders the “Good Death” and the forces within medicine that stand in its way.<BR> <BR>Award-winning journalist Katy Butler was living thousands of miles from her aging parents when the call came: her beloved seventy-nine-year-old father had suffered a crippling stroke. Katy and her mother joined the more than 28 million Americans who are shepherding loved ones through their final declines.<BR> <BR>Doctors outfitted her father with a pacemaker, which kept his heart going while doing nothing to prevent a slide into dementia, near-blindness, and misery. When he said, “I’m living too long,” mother and daughter faced wrenching moral questions. Where is the line between saving a life and prolonging a dying? When do you say to a doctor, “Let my loved one go?”<BR> <BR>When doctors refused to disable the pacemaker, condemning her father to a lingering death, Butler set out to understand why. Her quest had barely begun <A>when her mother</A>, faced with her own grave illness, rebelled against her doctors, refused open-heart surgery, and met death the old-fashioned way: head-on.<BR> <BR>Part memoir, part medical history, and part spiritual guide, <I>Knocking on Heaven’s Door </I>is a map through the labyrinth of a broken medical system. Technological medicine, obsessed with maximum longevity, is creating more suffering than it prevents. Butler chronicles the rise of Slow Medicine, a movement bent on reclaiming the “Good Deaths” our ancestors prized. In families, hospitals, and the public sphere, this visionary memoir is<I> </I>inspiring the difficult conversations we must have to light the path to a better way of death.<BR> <BR><i>“</i>A lyrical meditation written with extraordinary beauty and sensitivity” (<I>San Francisco Chronicle</I>).