This two-volume book offers extensive interviews with persons who have made significant contributions to thanatology, the study of dying, death, loss, and grief. The book’s in-depth conversations provide compelling life stories of interest to clinicians, researchers, and educated lay persons, and to specialists interested in oral history as a means of gaining rich understandings of persons’ lives. Several disciplines that contribute to thanatology are represented in this book, such as psychology, religious studies, art, literature, history, social work, nursing, theology, education, psychiatry, sociology, philosophy, and anthropology. The book is unique; no other text offers such a comprehensive, insightful, and personal review of work in the thanatology field.

The salience of thanatology is obvious when we consider several topics, including the aging demographics of most countries, the leading causes of death, the devastation of COVID-19, the realities of how most persons die, the growth both of hospice and of efforts within medicine to ensure that a good death becomes the norm of medical practice, and increases in the number of countries and states permitting physician-assisted suicide.

This second volume includes conversations with 16 thanatologists, a rich, extensive bibliography, an index of names and subjects, and a biographical sketch of the author. The experts interviewed in this volume include Danai Papadatou, Holly Prigerson, Jack Jordan, Illene Cupit, Heather Servaty-Seib, Irwin Sandler, Simon Shimshon Rubin, Carla Sofka, Harold Ivan Smith, and Phyllis Kosminsky.