From Library Journal
The author of several best sellers, including The Road Less Traveled (which at last count has been on the New York Times Best Sellers list for 687 weeks), Peck here discusses a complex and timely matter?euthanasia. Peck wants to address the "spiritual" aspects of the decision, which he feels have been ignored in this too-secular world. He's taken on a huge task: to define physical and emotional suffering, to come up with guidelines for considering physician-assisted suicide, and to foster further dialog by society as a whole on these issues. This is not a book of answers; Peck instead encourages discussion about "learning through dying," what a soul consists of, and choosing hospice care when it's clear the end is near. Peck is a wonderful writer, engaging, intelligent, and full of stories from his long psychiatric practice; as usual, he takes on big issues with seriousness, sensitivity, and balance. Highly recommended.?Barbara O'Hara, Free Lib. of PhiladelphiaCopyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
Peck, very productive of late, may never have written a timelier, more cogent, more fluently readable book than this one. He believes that no current ethical-legal issue is more important than euthanasia and that there is not enough discussion of and even contention over it. He presents and considers the medical, spiritual, and social issues of euthanasia. Medicine, though it has finally conceded that "pulling the plug" on the terminally ill is a moral accession to the naturalness of dying, has yet to grant the necessity of fully relieving physical pain--that is, even to the point of eventually lethal doses of painkiller--and has barely begun to acknowledge hellish emotional pain as a condition from which suicide may be a wholly natural release. Spiritually, Peck insists that suicide done out of the individualistic desire to control one's life and to deny one's God-given soul must be discouraged, for life is a learning experience that ought to be fully realized, even through suffering. Yet Peck cites circumstances in which assisted suicide seems morally justified (one great strength of the book is the cases from which Peck educes the complexities he discusses--all of them real, drawn from his and other physicians' practices). He concludes, however, that at present society isn't spiritually strong enough to legalize physician-assisted suicide, which is perhaps the greatest reason that euthanasia must become the subject of a great and completely open debate, one that he has masterfully and engagingly begun. Ray Olson


From Kirkus Reviews
The bestselling author of The Road Less Traveled offers a nuanced and thought-provoking contribution to a debate that, he believes, is going to make us face important questions about our direction as a society. Although assisted-suicide practitioner Dr. Jack Kevorkian gives Peck the shivers, our author credits him for having almost single-handedly made euthanasia a national issue in the US. Peck has not written about euthanasia before, and he does so now, he says, because of his alarm at the lack of passion, the ``vast, tacit approval of euthanasia,'' that has followed Kevorkian's activities. Peck's own position is a mixture of pragmatism and principle. He is not totally against assisted suicide in cases of severe and prolonged physical pain, but he believes that hospice, with its concept of palliative medical care and liberal use of morphine pumps, should make this option unnecessary. Of more practical concern for Peck is the use of euthanasia as a way of avoiding existential suffering in the face of death. Drawing on actual case histories of assisted suicide, he notes a tendency for the patient to want to remain in control. Peck argues that evading the process of gradual detachment at the approach of death is to succumb to the kind of fear that lies at the root of all neurosis. More radically, it is a denial of the soul and, as such, an expression of a deeply secular worldview. While Peck values secularism as an advance over religious bigotry, he suggests that it is a stage of limited personal growth. Peck is very careful to define his terms. As in all his books, he draws on his years of work as a therapist and on his personal struggles. Peck's open-ended and compassionate approach will speak to all shades of opinion. (For another look at euthanasia, see Bert Keizer, Dancing with Mister D, p. TK.) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Book Description
In a position and argument affirmed by no less a moral authority than the Supreme Court, the author of "The Road Less Traveled", the bestselling and most influential book of spiritual instruction in modern times, asks whether we have the ethical right to kill ourselves even though we have the power. 'Peck makes a moving case against euthanasia on demand. Throughout, he writes with sensitivity, sympathy, and insight".--"Detroit News".


From the Inside Flap
The author of The Road Less Traveled, the bestselling and most influential book of psychiatric and spiritual instruction in modern times, now offers a deeply moving meditation on what euthanasia reveals about the status of the soul in our age. Its trenchant and sensitive treatment of the subject will define our humanity for generations to come.


From the Hardcover edition.

ANNOTATION

Discusses euthansia from medical & psychiatric perspectives, simplicity of spirituality, future societal considerations.

FROM THE PUBLISHER