-
Knocking on Heaven's Door
- The Path to a Better Way of Death
- Narrated by: Katy Butler
- Length: 10 hrs and 28 mins
Failed to add items
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Buy for $17.96
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
Listeners also enjoyed...
-
The Art of Dying Well
- A Practical Guide to a Good End of Life
- By: Katy Butler
- Narrated by: Katy Butler
- Length: 7 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
An inspiring, informative, and practical guide to navigating end-of-life issues, by a groundbreaking expert in the field and the New York Times best-selling author of Knocking on Heaven’s Door. Katy Butler argues that we have lost touch with the “art of dying” as practiced by our ancestors, yet we still hunger for rites of passage and a sense of the sacred, especially in the important life transitions of aging and dying.
-
-
Me too
- By Clif Green on 01-04-20
By: Katy Butler
-
With the End in Mind
- Dying, Death, and Wisdom in an Age of Denial
- By: Kathryn Mannix
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Carling, Kathryn Mannix
- Length: 11 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Modern medical technology is allowing us to live longer and fuller lives than ever before. But with changes in the way we understand medicine come changes in the way we understand death. Once a familiar and gentle process, death has come to be something from which we shy away, preferring to fight it desperately than to accept its inevitability. Palliative care has a long tradition in Britain, where Dr. Kathryn Mannix has practiced it for 30 years. In this book, she shares beautifully crafted stories from a lifetime of caring for the dying.
-
-
Wonderful book!
- By Randall Roth on 01-29-18
By: Kathryn Mannix
-
Being Mortal
- Medicine and What Matters in the End
- By: Atul Gawande
- Narrated by: Robert Petkoff
- Length: 9 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Being Mortal, best-selling author Atul Gawande tackles the hardest challenge of his profession: how medicine can not only improve life but also the process of its ending. Medicine has triumphed in modern times, transforming birth, injury, and infectious disease from harrowing to manageable. But in the inevitable condition of aging and death, the goals of medicine seem too frequently to run counter to the interest of the human spirit.
-
-
A Walk through the Valley of the Shadow
- By George on 11-02-14
By: Atul Gawande
-
A Beginner's Guide to the End
- Practical Advice for Living Life and Facing Death
- By: Dr. BJ Miller, Shoshana Berger
- Narrated by: BJ Miller, Shoshana Berger
- Length: 11 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The first-ever practical, compassionate, and comprehensive guide to dying - and living fully until you do.
-
-
Essential reading wiithout exception
- By Daniel J. DiBona on 08-24-19
By: Dr. BJ Miller, and others
-
Advice for Future Corpses (and Those Who Love Them)
- A Practical Perspective on Death and Dying
- By: Sallie Tisdale
- Narrated by: Gabra Zackman
- Length: 7 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
You get ready to die the way you get ready for a trip. Start by realizing you don't know the way. Listen to a few travel guides. Study the language, look at maps, gather equipment. Let yourself imagine what it will be like. Pack your bags. This book is one of those travel guides - a guide to preparing for your own death and the deaths of people close to you. The fact of death is hard to believe. Sallie Tisdale explores our fears and all the ways death and talking about death make us uncomfortable - but she also explores its intimacies and joys.
-
-
I thought I had more time...
- By Alyssa on 09-09-19
By: Sallie Tisdale
-
When Breath Becomes Air
- By: Paul Kalanithi, Abraham Verghese - foreword
- Narrated by: Sunil Malhotra, Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 5 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated.
-
-
Phenomenal book!
- By A. Potter on 01-16-16
By: Paul Kalanithi, and others
-
The Art of Dying Well
- A Practical Guide to a Good End of Life
- By: Katy Butler
- Narrated by: Katy Butler
- Length: 7 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
An inspiring, informative, and practical guide to navigating end-of-life issues, by a groundbreaking expert in the field and the New York Times best-selling author of Knocking on Heaven’s Door. Katy Butler argues that we have lost touch with the “art of dying” as practiced by our ancestors, yet we still hunger for rites of passage and a sense of the sacred, especially in the important life transitions of aging and dying.
-
-
Me too
- By Clif Green on 01-04-20
By: Katy Butler
-
With the End in Mind
- Dying, Death, and Wisdom in an Age of Denial
- By: Kathryn Mannix
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Carling, Kathryn Mannix
- Length: 11 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Modern medical technology is allowing us to live longer and fuller lives than ever before. But with changes in the way we understand medicine come changes in the way we understand death. Once a familiar and gentle process, death has come to be something from which we shy away, preferring to fight it desperately than to accept its inevitability. Palliative care has a long tradition in Britain, where Dr. Kathryn Mannix has practiced it for 30 years. In this book, she shares beautifully crafted stories from a lifetime of caring for the dying.
-
-
Wonderful book!
- By Randall Roth on 01-29-18
By: Kathryn Mannix
-
Being Mortal
- Medicine and What Matters in the End
- By: Atul Gawande
- Narrated by: Robert Petkoff
- Length: 9 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Being Mortal, best-selling author Atul Gawande tackles the hardest challenge of his profession: how medicine can not only improve life but also the process of its ending. Medicine has triumphed in modern times, transforming birth, injury, and infectious disease from harrowing to manageable. But in the inevitable condition of aging and death, the goals of medicine seem too frequently to run counter to the interest of the human spirit.
-
-
A Walk through the Valley of the Shadow
- By George on 11-02-14
By: Atul Gawande
-
A Beginner's Guide to the End
- Practical Advice for Living Life and Facing Death
- By: Dr. BJ Miller, Shoshana Berger
- Narrated by: BJ Miller, Shoshana Berger
- Length: 11 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The first-ever practical, compassionate, and comprehensive guide to dying - and living fully until you do.
-
-
Essential reading wiithout exception
- By Daniel J. DiBona on 08-24-19
By: Dr. BJ Miller, and others
-
Advice for Future Corpses (and Those Who Love Them)
- A Practical Perspective on Death and Dying
- By: Sallie Tisdale
- Narrated by: Gabra Zackman
- Length: 7 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
You get ready to die the way you get ready for a trip. Start by realizing you don't know the way. Listen to a few travel guides. Study the language, look at maps, gather equipment. Let yourself imagine what it will be like. Pack your bags. This book is one of those travel guides - a guide to preparing for your own death and the deaths of people close to you. The fact of death is hard to believe. Sallie Tisdale explores our fears and all the ways death and talking about death make us uncomfortable - but she also explores its intimacies and joys.
-
-
I thought I had more time...
- By Alyssa on 09-09-19
By: Sallie Tisdale
-
When Breath Becomes Air
- By: Paul Kalanithi, Abraham Verghese - foreword
- Narrated by: Sunil Malhotra, Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 5 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated.
-
-
Phenomenal book!
- By A. Potter on 01-16-16
By: Paul Kalanithi, and others
-
The Five Invitations
- Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully
- By: Frank Ostaseski
- Narrated by: Frank Ostaseski
- Length: 12 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Death is not waiting for us at the end of a long road. Death is always with us, in the marrow of every passing moment. She is the secret teacher hiding in plain sight, helping us to discover what matters most. Life and death are a package deal. They cannot be pulled apart, and we cannot truly live unless we are aware of death. The Five Invitations is an exhilarating meditation on the meaning of life and how maintaining an ever-present consciousness of death can bring us closer to our truest selves.
-
-
A wonderful resource for caregivers, patients
- By Elizabeth Kerin on 02-05-18
By: Frank Ostaseski
-
Farewell: Vital End-of-Life Questions with Candid Answers from a Leading Palliative and Hospice Physician
- By: Edward Creagan MD, Sandra Wendel
- Narrated by: Benjamin McLean
- Length: 7 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
How long am I going to live? Who will be with me when I die? Will my family forgive me? Will I have pain? These are among the 31 vital end-of-life questions patients and their families ask. This audiobook is about navigating those last days, at the bedside, and saying farewell with hope, love, and compassion. Dr. Edward Creagan provides the reassuring answers patients and families deserve. He has dedicated his life to death. For over 40 winters at the Mayo Clinic he has been at the bedside with more than 40,000 patient encounters in the last stages of their lives on this Earth.
-
-
Everyone should read this book
- By Suzan on 10-15-18
By: Edward Creagan MD, and others
-
Everything Happens for a Reason
- And Other Lies I've Loved
- By: Kate Bowler
- Narrated by: Kate Bowler
- Length: 4 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Kate Bowler is a professor at Duke Divinity School with a modest Christian upbringing, but she specializes in the study of the prosperity gospel, a creed that sees fortune as a blessing from God and misfortune as a mark of God's disapproval. At 35, everything in her life seems to point toward "blessing". She is thriving in her job, married to her high school sweetheart, and loves life with her newborn son. Then she is diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer.
-
-
Please give me back the lost hours of my life!
- By Charles on 03-24-19
By: Kate Bowler
-
How We Die
- Reflections on Life's Final Chapter
- By: Sherwin B. Nuland
- Narrated by: Sherwin B. Nuland
- Length: 2 hrs and 56 mins
- Abridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Even more relevant than when it was first published, this edition addresses contemporary issues in end-of-life care and includes an all-embracing and incisive afterword that examines the state of health care and our relationship with life as it approaches its terminus. How We Die also discusses how we can take control of our own final days and those of our loved ones.
-
-
Rip-off
- By T. McG. on 03-07-14
-
Walking Each Other Home
- Conversations on Loving and Dying
- By: Mirabai Bush, Ram Dass
- Narrated by: Ram Dass, Mirabai Bush
- Length: 6 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
We all sit on the edge of a mystery. We have only known this life, so dying scares us - and we are all dying. But what if dying were perfectly safe? What if you could approach dying with curiosity and love? What if dying were the ultimate spiritual practice? Walking Each Other Home: Conversations on Loving and Dying reunites lifelong friends Ram Dass and Mirabai Bush, who speak on the spiritual opportunities in the dying process. They share intimate personal experiences and timeless practices for every aspect of this journey.
-
-
Wow - the love comes through
- By Dan Lentine on 09-13-18
By: Mirabai Bush, and others
-
That Good Night
- Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour
- By: Sunita Puri
- Narrated by: Soneela Nankani, Sunita Puri
- Length: 13 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
As the American-born daughter of immigrants, Dr. Sunita Puri knew from a young age that the gulf between her parents' experiences and her own was impossible to bridge, save for two elements: medicine and spirituality. Interweaving evocative stories of Puri's family and the patients she cares for, That Good Night is a stunning meditation on impermanence and the role of medicine in helping us to live and die well, arming listeners with information that will transform how we communicate with our doctors about what matters most to us.
-
-
Never needed 1.25x more... GREAT BOOK THOUGH!
- By Viejo Mzungu on 04-30-19
By: Sunita Puri
-
Extreme Measures
- Finding a Better Path to the End of Life
- By: Jessica Nutik Zitter M.D.
- Narrated by: Jessica Nutik Zitter M.D.
- Length: 11 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Jessica Zitter became a doctor because she wanted to be a hero. She elected to specialize in critical care - to become an ICU physician - and imagined herself swooping in to rescue patients from the brink of death. But then during her first code she found herself cracking the ribs of a patient so old and frail it was unimaginable he would ever come back to life. She began to question her choice. Extreme Measures charts Zitter's journey from wanting to be one kind of hero to becoming another - a doctor who prioritizes the patient's values and preferences.
-
-
Brilliant & eye-opening
- By Bob Kelley on 03-16-17
-
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes
- And Other Lessons from the Crematory
- By: Caitlin Doughty
- Narrated by: Caitlin Doughty
- Length: 7 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Most people want to avoid thinking about death, but Caitlin Doughty - a 20-something with a degree in medieval history and a flair for the macabre - took a job at a crematory, turning morbid curiosity into her life’s work. With an original voice that combines fearless curiosity and mordant wit, Caitlin tells an unusual coming-of-age story full of bizarre encounters, gallows humor, and vivid characters (both living and very dead).
-
-
Loved it So Much I Bought it After Reading it Free
- By J. Mattox on 05-17-17
By: Caitlin Doughty
-
Die Wise
- A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul
- By: Stephen Jenkinson
- Narrated by: Stephen Jenkinson
- Length: 18 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Die Wise does not offer seven steps for coping with death. It does not suggest ways to make dying easier. It pours no honey to make the medicine go down. Instead, with lyrical prose, deep wisdom, and stories from his two decades of working with dying people and their families, Stephen Jenkinson places death at the center of the discussion and asks us to behold it in all its painful beauty. Die Wise teaches the skills of dying, skills that have to be learned in the course of living deeply and well.
-
-
Wonderful book!
- By Kate on 12-22-16
-
My Father's Brain
- Life in the Shadow of Alzheimer's
- By: Sandeep Jauhar
- Narrated by: Sandeep Jauhar
- Length: 7 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Almost six million Americans—about one in every ten people over the age of sixty-five—have Alzheimer’s disease or related dementias, and this number is projected to more than double by 2050. What is it like to live with and amid this increasingly prevalent condition—an affliction that some fear more than death? In My Father’s Brain, the distinguished physician and author Sandeep Jauhar sets his father’s descent into Alzheimer’s alongside his own journey toward understanding this disease and how it might best be coped with, if not cured.
-
-
Finished in one sitting
- By Audio Nut on 04-11-23
By: Sandeep Jauhar
-
After
- A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal About Life and Beyond
- By: Bruce Greyson
- Narrated by: Sean Patrick Hopkins
- Length: 9 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The world's leading expert on near-death experiences reveals his journey toward rethinking the nature of death, life, and the continuity of consciousness.
-
-
Mainly the science of what NDE’s are NOT
- By K&T on 06-06-21
By: Bruce Greyson
-
It's OK That You're Not OK
- Meeting Grief and Loss in a Culture That Doesn't Understand
- By: Megan Devine
- Narrated by: Megan Devine
- Length: 7 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Megan Devine offers a profound new approach to both the experience of grief and the way we help others who have endured tragedy. Having experienced grief from both sides - as both a therapist and as a woman who witnessed the accidental drowning of her beloved partner - Megan writes with deep insight about the unspoken truths of loss, love, and healing.
-
-
The author of this book is capital-A Angry
- By A. E. Ober on 08-26-20
By: Megan Devine
Publisher's summary
Like so many of us, award-winning writer Katy Butler always assumed her aging parents would experience healthy, active retirements before dying peacefully at home. Then her father suffered a stroke that left him incapable of easily finishing a sentence or showering without assistance. Her mother was thrust into full-time caregiving, and Katy became one of the 24 million Americans who help care for aging parents. In an effort to correct a minor and non - life threatening heart arrhythmia, doctors outfitted her father with a pacemaker. The device kept his heart beating but did nothing to prevent his slide into dementia, incontinence, near-muteness, and misery. After several years, he asked his wife for help, telling her, "I am living too long."
Mother and daughter faced a series of wrenching moral questions: When does death cease being a curse and become a blessing? Where is the line between saving life and prolonging a dying? When is the right time to say to a doctor, "Let my loved one go?"
When doctors refused to disable the pace-maker, sentencing her father to a protracted and agonizing death, Katy set out to understand why. Her quest had barely begun when her mother faced her own illness, rebelled against her doctors, refused open-heart surgery, and instead met death head-on. Knocking on Heaven's Door, a revolutionary blend of memoir and investigative reporting, is the fruit of the Butler family's journey.
With a reporter's skill, a poet's eye, and a daughter's love, Butler explores what happens when our terror of death collides with the technological imperatives of modern medicine. Her provocative thesis is that advanced medicine, in its single-minded pursuit of maximum longevity, often creates more suffering than it prevents. Butler lays bare the tangled web of technology, medicine, and commerce that modern dying has become and chronicles the rise of Slow Medicine - a growing movement that promotes care over cure.
Knocking on Heaven's Door is a visionary map through the labyrinth of a broken and morally adrift medical system. It will inspire the necessary and difficult conversations we all need to have with loved ones as it illuminates a path to a better way of death.
Featured Article: A Future Corpse's Guide to Death Acceptance
Confronting death does not necessitate a spiral into despondency. Instead we may come a realization that, in acknowledging and accepting this fate, we paradoxically lead fuller and more emotionally present lives. In this list, scholars, physicians, journalists, philosophers, and death professionals share their stories, perspectives, and advice, offering a glimpse into how we can prepare for the end with grace, heart, and humor.
More from the same
Author
Narrator
Related to this topic
-
Changing the Way We Die
- Compassionate End-of-Life Care and the Hospice Movement
- By: Sheila Himmel, Fran Smith
- Narrated by: Coleen Marlo
- Length: 6 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
There’s a quiet revolution happening in the way we die. More than 1.5 million Americans a year die in hospice care - nearly 44 percent of all deaths - and a vast industry has sprung up to meet the growing demand. Once viewed as a New Age indulgence, hospice is now a $14 billion business and one of the most successful segments in health care. Changing the Way We Die, by award-winning journalists Fran Smith and Sheila Himmel, is the first book to take a broad, penetrating look at the hospice landscape.
-
-
Sadly, not very engaging.
- By Debra S. Long on 06-16-18
By: Sheila Himmel, and others
-
Doctored
- The Disillusionment of an American Physician
- By: Sandeep Jauhar
- Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor
- Length: 10 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Hoping for the stability he needs to start a family, Sandeep Jauhar, an attending cardiologist, accepts a position at a massive teaching hospital on the outskirts of Queens. With a decade's worth of elite medical training behind him, he is eager to settle down and reap the rewards of countless sleepless nights. Instead, he is confronted with sobering truths. Doctors' morale is low and getting lower.
-
-
Frank, inside perspective on the follies of unintended consequences in medical reform
- By Jared T Wilsey on 02-25-18
By: Sandeep Jauhar
-
Advice for Future Corpses (and Those Who Love Them)
- A Practical Perspective on Death and Dying
- By: Sallie Tisdale
- Narrated by: Gabra Zackman
- Length: 7 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
You get ready to die the way you get ready for a trip. Start by realizing you don't know the way. Listen to a few travel guides. Study the language, look at maps, gather equipment. Let yourself imagine what it will be like. Pack your bags. This book is one of those travel guides - a guide to preparing for your own death and the deaths of people close to you. The fact of death is hard to believe. Sallie Tisdale explores our fears and all the ways death and talking about death make us uncomfortable - but she also explores its intimacies and joys.
-
-
I thought I had more time...
- By Alyssa on 09-09-19
By: Sallie Tisdale
-
Your Heart, My Hands
- An Immigrant's Remarkable Journey to Become One of America's Preeminent Cardiac Surgeons
- By: Arun K. Singh MD, John Hanc - contributor, Delos Cosgrove MD - foreword
- Narrated by: Shridhar Solanki
- Length: 8 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Leaving a life marked by crippling setbacks and his father's doubt, in 1967 a 20-something doctor from India arrived in America with only five dollars and the desire to claim his American dream. Faced with an entirely new culture, racism, and the lasting effects of disabling childhood injuries, through hard work and perseverance he overcame all odds. Now having performed over 15,000 open-heart surgeries, more than nearly every surgeon in history, Dr. Singh reflects on his most memorable patients and his incredible personal life.
-
-
Remarkable!
- By Stacey on 12-01-22
By: Arun K. Singh MD, and others
-
Healing Hearts
- A Memoir of a Female Heart Surgeon
- By: Kathy Magliato
- Narrated by: Renée Raudman
- Length: 8 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Dr. Kathy Magliato is one of fewer than a dozen female heart surgeons practicing in the world today. She is also a member of an even more exclusive group - those surgeons who perform heart transplants. Healing Hearts is the story of the making of a surgeon who also calls herself a wife and mother.
-
-
Healing Hearts
- By Jean on 01-14-12
By: Kathy Magliato
-
God's Hotel
- A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine
- By: Victoria Sweet
- Narrated by: Victoria Sweet
- Length: 13 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
San Francisco's Laguna Honda Hospital is the last almshouse in the country, a descendant of the Hôtel-Dieu (God's hotel) that cared for the sick in the Middle Ages. Ballet dancers and rock musicians, professors and thieves - "anyone who had fallen, or, often, leapt, onto hard times" and needed extended medical care - ended up here. So did Victoria Sweet, who came for two months and stayed for 20 years. Laguna Honda, lower-tech but human-paced, gave Sweet the opportunity to practice a kind of attentive medicine that has almost vanished.
-
-
Great read
- By kayla solomon on 04-08-17
By: Victoria Sweet
-
Changing the Way We Die
- Compassionate End-of-Life Care and the Hospice Movement
- By: Sheila Himmel, Fran Smith
- Narrated by: Coleen Marlo
- Length: 6 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
There’s a quiet revolution happening in the way we die. More than 1.5 million Americans a year die in hospice care - nearly 44 percent of all deaths - and a vast industry has sprung up to meet the growing demand. Once viewed as a New Age indulgence, hospice is now a $14 billion business and one of the most successful segments in health care. Changing the Way We Die, by award-winning journalists Fran Smith and Sheila Himmel, is the first book to take a broad, penetrating look at the hospice landscape.
-
-
Sadly, not very engaging.
- By Debra S. Long on 06-16-18
By: Sheila Himmel, and others
-
Doctored
- The Disillusionment of an American Physician
- By: Sandeep Jauhar
- Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor
- Length: 10 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Hoping for the stability he needs to start a family, Sandeep Jauhar, an attending cardiologist, accepts a position at a massive teaching hospital on the outskirts of Queens. With a decade's worth of elite medical training behind him, he is eager to settle down and reap the rewards of countless sleepless nights. Instead, he is confronted with sobering truths. Doctors' morale is low and getting lower.
-
-
Frank, inside perspective on the follies of unintended consequences in medical reform
- By Jared T Wilsey on 02-25-18
By: Sandeep Jauhar
-
Advice for Future Corpses (and Those Who Love Them)
- A Practical Perspective on Death and Dying
- By: Sallie Tisdale
- Narrated by: Gabra Zackman
- Length: 7 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
You get ready to die the way you get ready for a trip. Start by realizing you don't know the way. Listen to a few travel guides. Study the language, look at maps, gather equipment. Let yourself imagine what it will be like. Pack your bags. This book is one of those travel guides - a guide to preparing for your own death and the deaths of people close to you. The fact of death is hard to believe. Sallie Tisdale explores our fears and all the ways death and talking about death make us uncomfortable - but she also explores its intimacies and joys.
-
-
I thought I had more time...
- By Alyssa on 09-09-19
By: Sallie Tisdale
-
Your Heart, My Hands
- An Immigrant's Remarkable Journey to Become One of America's Preeminent Cardiac Surgeons
- By: Arun K. Singh MD, John Hanc - contributor, Delos Cosgrove MD - foreword
- Narrated by: Shridhar Solanki
- Length: 8 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Leaving a life marked by crippling setbacks and his father's doubt, in 1967 a 20-something doctor from India arrived in America with only five dollars and the desire to claim his American dream. Faced with an entirely new culture, racism, and the lasting effects of disabling childhood injuries, through hard work and perseverance he overcame all odds. Now having performed over 15,000 open-heart surgeries, more than nearly every surgeon in history, Dr. Singh reflects on his most memorable patients and his incredible personal life.
-
-
Remarkable!
- By Stacey on 12-01-22
By: Arun K. Singh MD, and others
-
Healing Hearts
- A Memoir of a Female Heart Surgeon
- By: Kathy Magliato
- Narrated by: Renée Raudman
- Length: 8 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Dr. Kathy Magliato is one of fewer than a dozen female heart surgeons practicing in the world today. She is also a member of an even more exclusive group - those surgeons who perform heart transplants. Healing Hearts is the story of the making of a surgeon who also calls herself a wife and mother.
-
-
Healing Hearts
- By Jean on 01-14-12
By: Kathy Magliato
-
God's Hotel
- A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine
- By: Victoria Sweet
- Narrated by: Victoria Sweet
- Length: 13 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
San Francisco's Laguna Honda Hospital is the last almshouse in the country, a descendant of the Hôtel-Dieu (God's hotel) that cared for the sick in the Middle Ages. Ballet dancers and rock musicians, professors and thieves - "anyone who had fallen, or, often, leapt, onto hard times" and needed extended medical care - ended up here. So did Victoria Sweet, who came for two months and stayed for 20 years. Laguna Honda, lower-tech but human-paced, gave Sweet the opportunity to practice a kind of attentive medicine that has almost vanished.
-
-
Great read
- By kayla solomon on 04-08-17
By: Victoria Sweet
-
The Good Death
- An Exploration of Dying in America
- By: Ann Neumann
- Narrated by: Suzanne Toren
- Length: 8 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Following the death of her father, journalist and hospice volunteer Ann Neumann sets out to examine what it means to die well in the United States. When Ann Neumann's father was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, she left her job and moved back to her hometown of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. She became his full-time caregiver - cooking, cleaning, and administering medications. When her father died, she was undone by the experience, by grief and the visceral quality of dying.
-
-
Ugh, so boring
- By Maranto on 05-13-19
By: Ann Neumann
-
When Breath Becomes Air
- By: Paul Kalanithi, Abraham Verghese - foreword
- Narrated by: Sunil Malhotra, Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 5 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated.
-
-
Phenomenal book!
- By A. Potter on 01-16-16
By: Paul Kalanithi, and others
-
Forever Ours
- Real Stories of Immortality and Living from a Forensic Pathologist
- By: Janis Amatuzio
- Narrated by: Janis Amatuzio
- Length: 3 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Forensic pathologist Janis Amatuzio first began recording the stories told to her by patients, police officers, and other doctors because she felt that no one spoke for the dead. She believed the real experience of death, namely the spiritual and otherworldly experiences of those near death and their loved ones, was ignored by the medical professionals, who thought of death as simply the cessation of breath. She knew there was more.
-
-
Forever Ours
- By Londa on 01-04-06
By: Janis Amatuzio
-
Messenger
- The Legacy of Mattie J. T. Stepanek and Heartsongs
- By: Jeni Stepanek
- Narrated by: Jeni Stepanek
- Length: 11 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Oprah Winfrey has called him an inspiration, Maya Angelou saw him as a kindred spirit and fellow poet, and Jimmy Carter described Mattie Stepanek as the "most remarkable person I have ever known". When Jerry Lewis received his lifetime achievement award at the Oscars, footage of Mattie played behind him. Five years after his death from a rare neuromuscular disease, Mattie is still being celebrated for his indomitable spirit and message of hope.
-
-
Loved Jeni telling Mattie’s story
- By Hello Mrs. on 12-29-22
By: Jeni Stepanek
-
Chicken Soup for the Soul: Think Positive
- 101 Inspirational Stories about Counting Your Blessings and Having a Positive Attitude
- By: Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen, Amy Newmark, and others
- Narrated by: Tanya Eby, Jim Bond
- Length: 10 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
101 True Stories about how Positive Thinking can change your life! Everyone needs a little attitude adjustment once in a while, and these amazing true life stories reveal how real people used positive thinking to improve their lives and overcome challenges. You’ll read stories about how you can make every day a special day, incorporate gratitude and joy into your daily life, count your blessings and change your outlook, use a few well-chosen words to reorient your life, manage cancer and other health challenges through a positive attitude, simplify and have a more meaningful life and more!
-
-
Great read!
- By AnAppleForEden on 02-12-13
By: Jack Canfield, and others
-
A Bittersweet Season
- Caring for Our Aging Parents - And Ourselves
- By: Jane Gross
- Narrated by: Kate Reading
- Length: 15 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In telling the intimate story of caring for her aged and ailing mother, Jane Gross offers indispensable, and often surprising, advice for the rapidly increasing number of adult children responsible for aging parents. Gross deftly weaves the specifics of her personal experience with a comprehensive resource for effectively managing the lives of one's own parents while keeping sanity and strength intact.
-
-
Exceptional, thought-provoking, liberating!
- By Anne on 08-10-11
By: Jane Gross
-
The Family Gene
- A Mission to Turn My Deadly Inheritance into a Hopeful Future
- By: Joselin Linder
- Narrated by: Khristine Hvam
- Length: 7 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When Joselin Linder was in her 20s, her legs started to swell. She thought little of it until her health problems started to compound in ways that baffled her doctors. Diagnosed with extreme liver blockage and dangerous levels of lymph fluid, Joselin turned to the most similar case she could think of - her father's.
By: Joselin Linder
-
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down
- A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures
- By: Anne Fadiman
- Narrated by: Pamela Xiong
- Length: 13 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When three-month-old Lia Lee arrived at the county hospital emergency room in Merced, California, a chain of events was set in motion from which neither she nor her parents nor her doctors would ever recover. Lia's parents, Foua and Nao Kao, were part of a large Hmong community in Merced, refugees from the CIA-run "Quiet War" in Laos.
-
-
Good audiobook but narrator struggles with basic pronunciation
- By Kate on 06-04-15
By: Anne Fadiman
-
Chicken Soup for the Nurse's Soul
- Stories to Celebrate, Honor, and Inspire the Nursing Profession
- By: Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen, Nancy Mitchell-Autio, and others
- Narrated by: Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen
- Length: 1 hr and 13 mins
- Abridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
This collection of true stories champions the daily contributions, commitments, and sacrifices of nurses and portrays the compassion, intellect, and wit necessary to meet the challenging demands of the profession.
-
-
Great collection of stories, mixed narration
- By Mark and Amy Acker on 09-12-12
By: Jack Canfield, and others
-
Do No Harm
- Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery
- By: Henry Marsh
- Narrated by: Jim Barclay
- Length: 9 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
With compassion and candor, leading neurosurgeon Henry Marsh reveals the fierce joy of operating, the profoundly moving triumphs, the harrowing disasters, the haunting regrets, and the moments of black humor that characterize a brain surgeon's life. If you believe that brain surgery is a precise and exquisite craft, practiced by calm and detached surgeons, this gripping, brutally honest account will make you think again.
-
-
Uneven
- By Scott on 06-02-15
By: Henry Marsh
-
Chicken Soup for the Soul: Stories of Faith
- Inspirational Stories of Hope, Devotion, Faith, and Miracles
- By: Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen, Amy Newmark - editor
- Narrated by: Sandra Burr, Tom Parks
- Length: 10 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
This is the first Chicken Soup audiobook to focus specifically on stories of faith, including 101 of the best stories from Chicken Soup’s library on faith, hope, miracles, and devotion. These true stories written by regular people tell of prayers answered miraculously, amazing coincidences, rediscovered faith, and the serenity that comes from believing in a greater power, appealing to Christians and those of other faiths, and everyone who seeks enlightenment and inspiration through a good story.
-
-
good read
- By Amazon Customer on 07-29-16
By: Jack Canfield, and others
-
Ghostbelly
- By: Elizabeth Heineman
- Narrated by: Coleen Marlo
- Length: 7 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Ghostbelly is Elizabeth Heineman’s personal account of a home birth that goes tragically wrong—ending in a stillbirth—and the harrowing process of grief and questioning that follows. It’s also Heineman’s unexpected tale of the loss of a newborn: before burial, she brings the baby home for overnight stays.
-
-
Healing
- By ngsquared on 04-17-23
People who viewed this also viewed...
-
The Art of Dying Well
- A Practical Guide to a Good End of Life
- By: Katy Butler
- Narrated by: Katy Butler
- Length: 7 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
An inspiring, informative, and practical guide to navigating end-of-life issues, by a groundbreaking expert in the field and the New York Times best-selling author of Knocking on Heaven’s Door. Katy Butler argues that we have lost touch with the “art of dying” as practiced by our ancestors, yet we still hunger for rites of passage and a sense of the sacred, especially in the important life transitions of aging and dying.
-
-
Me too
- By Clif Green on 01-04-20
By: Katy Butler
-
How We Die
- Reflections on Life's Final Chapter
- By: Sherwin B. Nuland
- Narrated by: Sherwin B. Nuland
- Length: 2 hrs and 56 mins
- Abridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Even more relevant than when it was first published, this edition addresses contemporary issues in end-of-life care and includes an all-embracing and incisive afterword that examines the state of health care and our relationship with life as it approaches its terminus. How We Die also discusses how we can take control of our own final days and those of our loved ones.
-
-
Rip-off
- By T. McG. on 03-07-14
-
Advice for Future Corpses (and Those Who Love Them)
- A Practical Perspective on Death and Dying
- By: Sallie Tisdale
- Narrated by: Gabra Zackman
- Length: 7 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
You get ready to die the way you get ready for a trip. Start by realizing you don't know the way. Listen to a few travel guides. Study the language, look at maps, gather equipment. Let yourself imagine what it will be like. Pack your bags. This book is one of those travel guides - a guide to preparing for your own death and the deaths of people close to you. The fact of death is hard to believe. Sallie Tisdale explores our fears and all the ways death and talking about death make us uncomfortable - but she also explores its intimacies and joys.
-
-
I thought I had more time...
- By Alyssa on 09-09-19
By: Sallie Tisdale
-
A Beginner's Guide to the End
- Practical Advice for Living Life and Facing Death
- By: Dr. BJ Miller, Shoshana Berger
- Narrated by: BJ Miller, Shoshana Berger
- Length: 11 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The first-ever practical, compassionate, and comprehensive guide to dying - and living fully until you do.
-
-
Essential reading wiithout exception
- By Daniel J. DiBona on 08-24-19
By: Dr. BJ Miller, and others
-
With the End in Mind
- Dying, Death, and Wisdom in an Age of Denial
- By: Kathryn Mannix
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Carling, Kathryn Mannix
- Length: 11 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Modern medical technology is allowing us to live longer and fuller lives than ever before. But with changes in the way we understand medicine come changes in the way we understand death. Once a familiar and gentle process, death has come to be something from which we shy away, preferring to fight it desperately than to accept its inevitability. Palliative care has a long tradition in Britain, where Dr. Kathryn Mannix has practiced it for 30 years. In this book, she shares beautifully crafted stories from a lifetime of caring for the dying.
-
-
Wonderful book!
- By Randall Roth on 01-29-18
By: Kathryn Mannix
-
Farewell: Vital End-of-Life Questions with Candid Answers from a Leading Palliative and Hospice Physician
- By: Edward Creagan MD, Sandra Wendel
- Narrated by: Benjamin McLean
- Length: 7 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
How long am I going to live? Who will be with me when I die? Will my family forgive me? Will I have pain? These are among the 31 vital end-of-life questions patients and their families ask. This audiobook is about navigating those last days, at the bedside, and saying farewell with hope, love, and compassion. Dr. Edward Creagan provides the reassuring answers patients and families deserve. He has dedicated his life to death. For over 40 winters at the Mayo Clinic he has been at the bedside with more than 40,000 patient encounters in the last stages of their lives on this Earth.
-
-
Everyone should read this book
- By Suzan on 10-15-18
By: Edward Creagan MD, and others
-
The Art of Dying Well
- A Practical Guide to a Good End of Life
- By: Katy Butler
- Narrated by: Katy Butler
- Length: 7 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
An inspiring, informative, and practical guide to navigating end-of-life issues, by a groundbreaking expert in the field and the New York Times best-selling author of Knocking on Heaven’s Door. Katy Butler argues that we have lost touch with the “art of dying” as practiced by our ancestors, yet we still hunger for rites of passage and a sense of the sacred, especially in the important life transitions of aging and dying.
-
-
Me too
- By Clif Green on 01-04-20
By: Katy Butler
-
How We Die
- Reflections on Life's Final Chapter
- By: Sherwin B. Nuland
- Narrated by: Sherwin B. Nuland
- Length: 2 hrs and 56 mins
- Abridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Even more relevant than when it was first published, this edition addresses contemporary issues in end-of-life care and includes an all-embracing and incisive afterword that examines the state of health care and our relationship with life as it approaches its terminus. How We Die also discusses how we can take control of our own final days and those of our loved ones.
-
-
Rip-off
- By T. McG. on 03-07-14
-
Advice for Future Corpses (and Those Who Love Them)
- A Practical Perspective on Death and Dying
- By: Sallie Tisdale
- Narrated by: Gabra Zackman
- Length: 7 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
You get ready to die the way you get ready for a trip. Start by realizing you don't know the way. Listen to a few travel guides. Study the language, look at maps, gather equipment. Let yourself imagine what it will be like. Pack your bags. This book is one of those travel guides - a guide to preparing for your own death and the deaths of people close to you. The fact of death is hard to believe. Sallie Tisdale explores our fears and all the ways death and talking about death make us uncomfortable - but she also explores its intimacies and joys.
-
-
I thought I had more time...
- By Alyssa on 09-09-19
By: Sallie Tisdale
-
A Beginner's Guide to the End
- Practical Advice for Living Life and Facing Death
- By: Dr. BJ Miller, Shoshana Berger
- Narrated by: BJ Miller, Shoshana Berger
- Length: 11 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The first-ever practical, compassionate, and comprehensive guide to dying - and living fully until you do.
-
-
Essential reading wiithout exception
- By Daniel J. DiBona on 08-24-19
By: Dr. BJ Miller, and others
-
With the End in Mind
- Dying, Death, and Wisdom in an Age of Denial
- By: Kathryn Mannix
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Carling, Kathryn Mannix
- Length: 11 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Modern medical technology is allowing us to live longer and fuller lives than ever before. But with changes in the way we understand medicine come changes in the way we understand death. Once a familiar and gentle process, death has come to be something from which we shy away, preferring to fight it desperately than to accept its inevitability. Palliative care has a long tradition in Britain, where Dr. Kathryn Mannix has practiced it for 30 years. In this book, she shares beautifully crafted stories from a lifetime of caring for the dying.
-
-
Wonderful book!
- By Randall Roth on 01-29-18
By: Kathryn Mannix
-
Farewell: Vital End-of-Life Questions with Candid Answers from a Leading Palliative and Hospice Physician
- By: Edward Creagan MD, Sandra Wendel
- Narrated by: Benjamin McLean
- Length: 7 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
How long am I going to live? Who will be with me when I die? Will my family forgive me? Will I have pain? These are among the 31 vital end-of-life questions patients and their families ask. This audiobook is about navigating those last days, at the bedside, and saying farewell with hope, love, and compassion. Dr. Edward Creagan provides the reassuring answers patients and families deserve. He has dedicated his life to death. For over 40 winters at the Mayo Clinic he has been at the bedside with more than 40,000 patient encounters in the last stages of their lives on this Earth.
-
-
Everyone should read this book
- By Suzan on 10-15-18
By: Edward Creagan MD, and others
-
Being Mortal
- Medicine and What Matters in the End
- By: Atul Gawande
- Narrated by: Robert Petkoff
- Length: 9 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Being Mortal, best-selling author Atul Gawande tackles the hardest challenge of his profession: how medicine can not only improve life but also the process of its ending. Medicine has triumphed in modern times, transforming birth, injury, and infectious disease from harrowing to manageable. But in the inevitable condition of aging and death, the goals of medicine seem too frequently to run counter to the interest of the human spirit.
-
-
A Walk through the Valley of the Shadow
- By George on 11-02-14
By: Atul Gawande
-
Knocking on Heaven's Door
- How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World
- By: Lisa Randall
- Narrated by: Carrington MacDuffie
- Length: 14 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The latest developments in physics have the potential to radically revise our understanding of the world: its makeup, its evolution, and the fundamental forces that drive its operation. Knocking on Heaven's Door is an exhilarating and accessible overview of these developments and an impassioned argument for the significance of science. There could be no better guide than Lisa Randall.
-
-
Too Political
- By Allan on 12-14-11
By: Lisa Randall
-
When Breath Becomes Air
- By: Paul Kalanithi, Abraham Verghese - foreword
- Narrated by: Sunil Malhotra, Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 5 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated.
-
-
Phenomenal book!
- By A. Potter on 01-16-16
By: Paul Kalanithi, and others
-
It's OK That You're Not OK
- Meeting Grief and Loss in a Culture That Doesn't Understand
- By: Megan Devine
- Narrated by: Megan Devine
- Length: 7 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Megan Devine offers a profound new approach to both the experience of grief and the way we help others who have endured tragedy. Having experienced grief from both sides - as both a therapist and as a woman who witnessed the accidental drowning of her beloved partner - Megan writes with deep insight about the unspoken truths of loss, love, and healing.
-
-
The author of this book is capital-A Angry
- By A. E. Ober on 08-26-20
By: Megan Devine
-
The Song of the Cell
- An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human
- By: Siddhartha Mukherjee
- Narrated by: Dennis Boutsikaris
- Length: 16 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From the author of The Emperor of All Maladies, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and The Gene, a #1 New York Times bestseller, comes his most spectacular book yet, an exploration of medicine and our radical new ability to manipulate cells. Rich with Mukherjee’s revelatory and exhilarating stories of scientists, doctors, and the patients whose lives may be saved by their work, The Song of the Cell is the third book in this extraordinary writer’s exploration of what it means to be human.
-
-
Beyond Words Wonderful
- By Lynn on 11-27-22
-
The In-Between
- Unforgettable Encounters During Life's Final Moments
- By: Hadley Vlahos R.N.
- Narrated by: Hadley Vlahos R.N.
- Length: 7 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Talking about death and dying is considered taboo in polite company, and even in the medical field. Our ideas about dying are confusing at best: Will our memories flash before our eyes? Regrets consume our thoughts? Does a bright light appear at the end of a tunnel? For most people, it will be a slower process, one eased with preparedness, good humor, and a bit of faith. At the forefront of changing attitudes around palliative care is hospice nurse Hadley Vlahos, who shows that end-of-life care can teach us just as much about how to live as it does about how we die.
-
-
Author's Reach is Beyond Her Grasp
- By CW on 07-26-23
What listeners say about Knocking on Heaven's Door
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- MAUREEN
- 10-21-13
A better way to narrate a book about death?
What would have made Knocking on Heaven's Door better?
The narrator droned on and on--much like a dirge.
Would you recommend Knocking on Heaven's Door to your friends? Why or why not?
Perhaps--although I would suggest he or she try reading the book--and avoid the audible format.
Who would you have cast as narrator instead of Katy Butler?
Not sure--John Lee?
What character would you cut from Knocking on Heaven's Door?
This question does not pertain to this book.
Any additional comments?
The author's thesis has merit, but her atheism was a huge obstacle to my finding it applicable to my life. I would periodically nod to myself agreeing, "She has a point here." But then her super depressing voice and "story" with no twinge of joy or hope would overwhelm my ability to relate.
I too lost my father recently so have been thinking more about death and agree that our society could benefit from discussing its inevitability. I still miss my father and talk with my mother and siblings about him and the feelings of emptiness brought on by his death --but then I recall his deep faith and how much he looked forward to Heaven. When my father took his last breath, my younger sister rushed to open the windows and doors so that the angels could enter. And later when all 8 of us lovingly zipped up the bag containing his body, and walked alongside staff from the funeral home as they wheeled the gurney to the hearse, we knew he had already gone to Heaven. It was such a comfort and a beautiful memory. In conclusion, I felt sorry for the author quite often—she was without God, faith or community, sisters or any children of her own, left alone with all that grief.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
4 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Clyde A. Warden Jr.
- 04-20-14
Very relevant story that could be executed better
What would have made Knocking on Heaven's Door better?
Taking the product out of the author's hands more. Narration would have benefited from another person's interpretation. A stronger editor could have narrowed the story more and prevented Ms. Butler's frequent repeats and overuse of forced metaphors.
What was the most interesting aspect of this story? The least interesting?
The story is very personal, yet universal. This is Ms. Butler's strength, however, much time is spent on working out her own personal issues with her family, with childhood issues repeated a number of times. This slows down the story, lessens the impact, and at times is tiresome.
Would you be willing to try another one of Katy Butler’s performances?
No.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
3 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Jessica
- 07-09-16
Difficult to review due to morality issues
Would you recommend this book to a friend? Why or why not?
I would not.
Would you ever listen to anything by Katy Butler again?
No
If this book were a movie would you go see it?
No
Any additional comments?
I will be 100% honest. This is probably the most difficult and confusing review I believe I have written thus far, therfore, I chose a middle of the road rating.
There were many parts of this book, such as statistics and other information on aging and the dying process that I found fascinating, but on the other hand, I am a christian and hold strong views as to we should wait until God takes us to die. I realize that in some instances, pulling the plug is the less painful option, but it is my belief that God is not finished with us until He calls us home and not a second before.
I was absolutely horrified at how her father was portrayed in some cases and the author's thoughts, actions and feelings about her father and his dying process. She just wanted him to die and move on. At every corner it seemed that she was running from helping her mother and when she did decide to stop her life and help, her trips were always cut short because her and her mother were at odds. She states that at the end stages of her fathers life, they did not give him food or water and supposedly doctors said that was not a painful way to die. I'm not sure if you've ever gone days or weeks without drinking water or eating, but after several hours I feel as if I'm about to die.
I came into this book with no expectations except that I was hoping to get more insight into this author's thoughts and views. She did bring forth strong emotions, I will give her that and at the end of the book, I was in tears, not necessarily for the story that she told, but for a similar situation that I am going through with my own grandfather. Just a few short months ago, I sat in the hospital with him day and night not sure if he was going to pull through and then I continued my journey with him day and night through his month long stay at a long term accute care facility where I was thoroughly unimpressed with the general doctors bedside manner nor was I impressed with how he treated my grandfather, but thats another story for another day. My point there is that I did not feel as if they were taking extreme actions to prolong my grandfather's life without thinking of his quality of life, if anything, I felt it was the opposite. I felt that if I hadn't been there as an advocate and pressed them for answers and tests they would have just written everything off as "old age" and moved on. Luckily, he was released from the hospital after 1 month in the long term accute care facility and was able to return home while receiving home health for approximately 1 month. I wouldn't go on to say that he is back to 100%, but for 85, I would say that he is doing very well. I definitely felt for the author as she was speaking about who difficult and heart breaking it is to see someone you love become someone that is a stranger to you as I am in the same boat. Seeing someone that has been so strong and resilient all their life become fragile and weak is tragic and nothing I would wish on my worst enemy.
One thing I did enjoy learning more about was palliative care, it is a topic I was fairly unversed with and now feel as though I have more knowledge for the future and options that are available for me and my family if that time ever comes.
Another issue I had with the book was how the author seemed to struggle with religion. She would quote scriptures from the bible, chants from buddhists and poems and such, but she didn't seem like she ever completely stuck with one nor did it seem to help her as much as Buddhism seemed to help her mother.
All in all, I'm glad I listened to this book and surprisingly the author was a fairly decent narrator, but it is not one that I would recommend to everyone, nor is it one I would read again.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
2 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Wendy
- 12-05-13
The most important book I've read in recent memory
There aren't enough stars for this incredibly timely book. THANKFULLY this journey, as it relates to my parents, is in my rear view mirror. But as it relates to me - we Americans have work to do. I'm going to shout this book's message from the rooftops. We need to re-think our "modern medicine's" approach to the last years/months/weeks/days of our lives, and this book lays out a difficult, but important intellectual game change in how we approach dying. A thousand stars to Katy Butler, for living through her parents deaths, and for so eloquently discussing how we can change OUR experiences moving forward.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
2 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Amazon Customer
- 09-11-13
A must for caregivers!
If you could sum up Knocking on Heaven's Door in three words, what would they be?
Beautiful, tragic, and motivating.
What did you like best about this story?
The fine details of the characters, nature, the body, the brain and our healthcare system.
What does Katy Butler bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?
Her voice conveys real emotion: calm, frustration, sadness, guilt, desperation, love, respect, and peace. Also, she made the many medical terms and descriptions easy to understand and visualize. (I would have glossed over them if reading.)
Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?
Yes, after a seven hour drive I wanted to sit in the car just to hear more.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
2 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Lisa J. Shultz
- 11-28-15
Unpleasant but important
What did you love best about Knocking on Heaven's Door?
The end of the book has strategies and questions to ponder and ask yourself or your parent. I will review them and give them more thought.
What other book might you compare Knocking on Heaven's Door to and why?
Being Mortal had similarities because of dealing with end of life issues involving parents. Being Moral was not just about the author's parents, but their story was interwoven into examples of other people.
What does Katy Butler bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?
Because she was the daughter of the parents involved, I enjoyed hearing her story from her personally as the reader. I could relate to her because I am going through some similar issues as she experienced and I felt more connected knowing she was not a professional speaker brought in for the project.
Any additional comments?
Reading about the slow agonizing death of one's parents is not uplifting but the message of how to have a better death experience is worthy. I found the information to be timely and pertinent to my own situation. If you have aging parents and want to be more aware of the pitfalls of prolonging life to beyond the point that either the parent or the caregivers can endure without lasting negative effects and undue suffering, read this book.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
1 person found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Sue Cannon
- 05-23-15
Put on your must read list.
This book will help you and your family look realistically at end of life issues...or at least to begin the conversation.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
1 person found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Amazon Customer
- 02-25-24
It might just save your death.
Never have I felt more gratitude to an author whilst listening to her words. I usually think it is a bad idea for authors to narrate their own work but this prayerfully narrated audiobook is an exception. If you think you (or someone you know) might, at some point, die - and particularly if you don't think about such things - then this honest, generous and profoundly compassionate work is just for you.
It might just save your death.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Hilary Smith
- 11-04-23
Invaluable -
A must read for anyone who will someday die! So, everyone can gain a deeper understanding of choices to make or will be made for you without you realizing the repercussions those choices might have.
With my 94.5 mother nearing her final years, this book could have been more prescient. Highly recommend.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Peter
- 10-21-23
Thank you for writing this book
Raw
Honest
Intimate
Much needed
The last , very practical chapter, could be a brochure for families and caregivers!
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!