Using an anthropological approach, Green (Univ. of Washington, Seattle) explores the changes in the US concepts of death and practices of dying in the last several decades. Drawing on a variety of sources, he examines modern-day care for the dying, modes of disposing of the corpse, near-death experience accounts and beliefs about the afterlife, presentation of death in children's literature, and ways of memorializing the deceased. What emerges out of this rather detailed survey is a "loose agglomeration of features that typify the American way of death." According to Green, the major changes in this way of death, which have been shaped by new technological, medical, and cultural trends, include a decrease in the attention paid to the dead body and an increase in the variety of "eschatological imagining." Instead of simply denying death, most Americans still struggle to construct some form of what Robert Jay Lifton calls "symbolic immortality." Judiciously combining anthropological theory, ethnographic data, and information from a variety of other sources, the author delivers an effective book that complements a growing body of works on the anthropology of death and dying. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. S. Kan Dartmouth College