... fascinating and deeply disturbing ... wide-ranging and meticulous research ... There’s a lot of 'narcissistic energy' in this book...There’s also plenty of compassion, plenty of nuance and plenty of complex thought. Engelhart is a skilled storyteller. She marshals a mass of questions and arguments ... Engelhart doesn’t reach any firm conclusions. She’s clear that the laws on assisted dying are unequal to the task. She doesn’t say what laws she would pass, and I don’t blame her. Her brilliant book should be prescribed to all those who think they have a clear view.
Engelhart does not take sides, but allows the individuals profiled to present their own stories ... A must-read for anyone concerned about quality of life at the end of life.
... [an] essential, vulnerable book ... Like much great narrative journalism, The Inevitable powerfully justifies its form when mapping how people relate to each other outside dominant systems—in this case, how end-of-life care can exist away from, or in opposition to, big medicine ... When The Inevitable snaps back to the perspectives of its individual subjects, the implications of these political threads can get lost; the perspectives of nonwhite patients, or people who harbor more doubt in the medical system from the get-go, are also mostly absent from the narrative. Still, the book’s brilliance is in how much fertile ground it lays for these questions.
... haunting stories ... It can be disturbing, learning about the many ways people take their own lives ... Through exhaustive reporting, Engelhart unflinchingly captures unsettling exit scenes that force readers to think about whether people must fulfill a 'duty to live' or whether they should be able to choose what they consider to be 'dignity in dying.'
... searching, compassionate ... Evenhandedly and without undue criticism, Engelhart brings forth the counterarguments, but she offers enough convincing evidence about the efficacy and ethical standing of the right-to-die movement that many readers will be persuaded of its value to society ... A meticulous and frank collection of end-of-life stories, conversations, and ideas.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay[/caption]
