Scripting Death

""A beautifully written, thought-provoking ethnography that traces how patients, family caregivers, health care providers, activists, and legislators navigate this new world in which MAID is a legal option. . . . This book is essential reading for courses on death and dying, health care, and bioethics and will be eye-opening for those caring for terminally ill loved ones or grappling with their own life-or-death decisions. . . . Highly recommended."" * CHOICE * “Buchbinder offers a compelling introduction to the complexity and inconsistency of ethical stances around life and death decision-making. In addition, she calls attention to the danger of reducing the forms of personhood and sociality produced through impending death to individual autonomy. And she  shows the heart-wrenching consequences of unequal access to information and care in the United States. Scripting Death is a wonderful introduction to a pressing social issue.” * Medical Anthropology Quarterly * “​""Buchbinder’s work is the latest of several highly accessible health related ethnographies that represent a resurgence of anthropology in which real people talk rather than ‘discourse,’  questions are asked rather than ‘interrogated,’ and the term ‘reinscribe’ does not appear. A welcome development."" * The Hastings Center Report * ""Scripting Death provides a rich collection of Vermont stories about the challenges of organizing medical aid in dying, which serve as a microcosm of the broader problems faced by Americans in gaining access to health care."" * Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law * ""As a work in public anthropology, the text is readable and accessible, taking up what people say about assisted dying as a contemporary cultural form, and as a normatively charged endeavor."" * Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute *