Death is inevitable. But bad deaths those accompanied by unnecessarily prolonged pain and suffering, often aggravated by immensely costly and frequently futile medical treatments, can be avoided. This book explores the pioneering, highly pragmatic and practical work carried out by the international death-with-dignity movement over the last forty years to eliminate the last bad death. It offers clear and valuable examples of how, through frank communication with caregivers and loved ones and the use of Advance Medical Directives such as living wills, those who are facing the possibility of death in the foreseeable future, and those who help them cope, can greatly minimize or eliminate end-of-life turmoil, family dissention, and pain. It also proposes a comprehensive rethinking of end-of-life-care assumptions and a realignment of strategies to create a caring continuum to meet the rapidly expanding demands for death with dignity in the coming years. Richard Cote" based this unique book on five years of intensive primary source research and more than one hundred in-depth interviews with death-with-dignity pioneers, activists, physicians, nurses, hospice workers, and their patients on four continents. It is written in narrative style for a general audience and intensely documented for the scholar. It illuminates the subject using 92 images and twelve hyperlinks to exclusive YouTube video interviews with death-with-dignity leaders worldwide. It explores the modern history of the death-with-dignity movement through the lives of its founders, leaders, and activists. Using personal case histories from around the world, it also portrays the often heart-breaking conflict between the final wishes of those who are living or dying in pain and the religious, medical, and laws which force them to spend their last days, months, or even years in avoidable pain and suffering against their clearly-stated will. Drawing on the most recent scientific and medical information, it also describes the rapid evolution of legal, dignified, readily available, painless methods which the tortured and the dying can use to hasten their own death without assistance, in the company, if they choose, of their friends and loved ones. PLEASE NOTE: this 379-page book replaces and updates Cote s 42-page 2008 technical booklet (now obsolete and out of print) titled In Search of Gentle Death: A Brief History of the NuTech Group an end-of-life technology development organization. All of NuTech s work is now described fully in Chapter 6 of this new 2012 book.