"Widely recognized as the best-selling textbook in the field, The Last Dance: Encountering Death and Dying, seventh edition, has been thoroughly revised to provide comprehensive, multidisciplinary, state-of-the-art coverage of topics in death, dying, and bereavement. Integrating the experiential and the scholarly, as well as the emotional and intellectual dimensions of death studies, this highly regarded textbook combines a solid grounding in theory and research with practical application to students' lives."--BOOK JACKET.

Attitudes toward death: a climate of change -- Perspectives on death: cross-cultural and historical -- Socialization: how we learn about death as children -- Health care systems: patients, staff, and institutions -- Facing death: living with life-threatening illness -- Last rites: funerals and body disposition -- Survivors: understanding the experience of loss -- Death in children's lives -- Death in the lives of adults -- Medical ethics: dying in a technological age -- The law and death -- Environmental encounters with death -- Suicide -- Beyond death/after life -- The path ahead: personal and social choices.