New from Left Coast Press, Inc. A 15% discount on web orders to the United States at www.LCoastPress.com.

Last Writes: A Daybook for a Dying Friend by Laurel Richardson, Ph.D.

This new ethnographic work intimately chronicles a long-term friendship in its final months of life as one of the friends succumbs to emphysema. Last Writes: A Daybook for a Dying Friend began as a tool to help author Laurel Richardson cope with the illness and eventual death of her dear friend and colleague, Betty Frankel Kirschner. Rich in emotional detail, honesty, and reflection, this daybook becomes part memoir, part sociological analysis, and part eulogy as it portrays the deep relationship between two women as one dies, the care each gives the other through the process, and the impact that illness, death and dying has on friends and family alike. A very touching expression of intimate emotions and a very engaging analysis of the social and emotional management of death and dying from the unique perspective of a close friend.

For medical scholars, this book chronicles in a most intimate, yet analytical way, the consequences of chronic of smoking in the final months of life and how it affects not only the victim of lung disease, but family and friends close to them.