Doughty’s memoir, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, was a funny and irresistible account of her experiences working in a crematorium. The job was a life-changer: Doughty now runs a nonprofit funeral home in Los Angeles and hosts the web series “Ask a Mortician.” Her second book is a fascinating catalog of funeral rituals and burial practices from around the world. Visiting Indonesia, Doughty reports on a family that dresses and cleans their grandfather’s mummified body—two years after the man’s death. In Bolivia, she encounters natitas, skulls that can grant wishes. Closer to home, she investigates green burials. Death is universal, but the ways of understanding it are myriad and thought-provoking.

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