The Inevitable: Dispatches on the Right to Die

Description

Meet Adam. He's twenty-seven years old, articulate and attractive. He also wants to die. Should he be helped? In The Inevitable, award-winning journalist Katie Engelhart explores one of our most abiding taboos: that of assisted suicide. From Avril, the 80-year-old British woman illegally importing pentobarbital to the Australian doctor dispensing suicide manuals online, Engelhart travels the world to hear the stories behind one of today's most hotly debated ethical dilemmas. At once intensely troubling and profoundly moving, The Inevitable interrogates our most uncomfortable moral questions. Should a paralyzed teenager be allowed to end her life? Should we be free to die painlessly before dementia takes our mind? But the book also does something more. In examining our end, it sheds crucial light on what it means to flourish and live.

Katie Engelhart is a writer and documentary filmmaker with NBC. She previously worked as a UK-based correspondent and presenter for VICE News. She is the recipient of numerous journalism awards, including the American National Magazine Award, the Canadian National Magazine Award and the British Broadcasting Award.

'A brilliantly sensitive and deeply moving account of assisted dying.' - Stephen Westaby, Sunday Times bestselling author of Fragile Lives 'I couldn't stop reading. Katie Engelhart refuses to look away from death, or more accurately, from dying. The Inevitable challenges us to keep looking and asking hard questions, even if we are uncomfortable with the answers.' - Anne Marie Slaughter, author of Unfinished Business: Women, Men, Work, Family 'An urgent and important book by a gifted young writer. With enormous empathy and rigor, and in lucid prose, Katie Engelhart grapples with the fundamental question of philosophy-judging whether or not a life is worth living. Wherever you fall on the debate over the right to determine one's own time and manner of death, The Inevitable will force you to re-examine your deepest assumptions about euthanasia and what it means to live and die with dignity.' - The New York Times Magazine