The warm fall day starts like any other at the Center--a women's reproductive health services clinic--its staff offering care to anyone who passes through its doors. Then, in late morning, a desperate and distraught gunman bursts in and opens fire, taking all inside hostage. After rushing to the scene, Hugh McElroy, a police hostage negotiator, sets up a perimeter and begins making a plan to communicate with the gunman. As his phone vibrates with...

Aldous Huxley's profoundly important classic of world literature, Brave New World is a searching vision of an unequal, technologically-advanced future where humans are genetically bred, socially indoctrinated, and pharmaceutically anesthetized to passively uphold an authoritarian ruling order--all at the cost of our freedom, full humanity, and perhaps also our souls. “A genius [who] who spent his life decrying the onward march of the Machine”...

Examines the controversial question of a terminally ill person's right to die.

Discusses issues surrounding death, including stages of death, prolonged life, euthanasia, religious and cultural views, and funeral customs.

Describes the efforts of Native Americans to rebury ancestral human remains and grave offerings held by museums and historical societies, with particular emphasis on the Pawnees and their struggle to reclaim their dead.

Every year some 30% of American corpses are cremated. And as journalist Annie Cheney discovered, no one keeps track of them before they reach their final destination. While the government has tight controls on organs and tissue meant for transplantation, there are other uses for cadavers that receive no oversight whatsoever: parts are used in commercial seminars to introduce new medical gadgetry; torsos are used for surgery practice; bodies are bought...