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Library Journal Review

This updated bibliography (Plenum Pr., 1979) provides critical annotations of 1700 books (rated on a five-star scale) published since 1979. Simpson is one of the world's leading experts on the subject and the developer of the taxonomy of thanatology. The breadth of coverage ranges from the serious to the arcane. Annotations are lengthy, critical, and often witty. The book appears to have been completed in 1984 and then updated twice (in 1985 and 1986). Inexcusably, the updated sections have not been integrated into the main bibliography and have separate indexes. However, good author and subject indexes and helpful lists of books on murder, terrorism, and megadeath make this the most useful work in its field. Brian E. Coutts, Western Kentucky Univ. Lib., Bowling Green (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

CHOICE Review

This bibliography sets out to discredit recent death and dying literature. Limited to books in print 1979-1986, it lists more than 1,700 capriciously annotated titles arranged alphabetically by title. The introduction sets the tone: the compiler sneers at much of the literature with such comments as ``do-goody fascism,'' ``hysterical hyperbole,'' ``literary equivalent of fast food,'' ``exhibitionistic,'' ``conceptually promiscuous.'' Simpson's rating system of zero to five stars could have been useful if it were based on announced criteria; but works by such established scholars as Robert Weir, James Childress, Tom Beauchamp, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, Thomas Shannon, and LeRoy Walters are generally panned for vague, tenuous, and faulty reasons. The highly regarded Bibliography of Bioethics (CH, Nov '76) is dismissed as ``relatively harmless ... hard to get excited about....'' The annotations often contain dilettantish or irrelevant comment (e.g., of Daniel Berrigan's We Die Before We Live, 1980: ``Isn't it amazing who ends up writing books on D&D? ... I'm waiting for one by Bette Midler''). This update of Simpson's earlier edition (1979) lists works that span the range of thanatology: death and dying, terminal care, counseling and education, grief, suicide, funerals, euthanasia, even murder, terrorism, and nuclear holocaust. Scholars and students will be better served by Albert Jay Miller and Michael James Acri's Death: A Bibliographic Guide (CH, Mar '78) or Robert Fulton's Death, Grief and Bereavement II: A Bibliography (CH, Dec '81). Not recommended.-J.A. Adams, Auburn University