User:SilverLiner/Good Life Good Death

Good Life Good Death: Memoir of how a writer became an euthanasia advocate, a book by Derek Humphry,

Book Overview
Published 2008 in English by Norris Lane Press. 19 chapters and 344 pages and including four pages of of color photos. Available in paperback, PDF eBook PDF and Amazon Kindle eBook formats. ISBN 978-0-9768283-3-4

Details from book description
For more than 30 years Derek Humphry has trail-blazed the right to die movement in America and the world. He founded the Hemlock Society USA, pioneered the Oregon Death With Dignity Act and wrote the bestselling books Jean’s Way and Final Exit. To know why he has maintained this struggle for choice in dying against powerful religious and political forces it is necessary to understand the whole man. In this candid memoir (a paperback original) he tells of his broken family, wartime experiences as a boy in England, and rising from the lowest to the highest rungs of journalism on two continents. He tells the moving story of his first wife’s terminal cancer and her way of ending it by assisted suicide which later became the model for the Oregon law. Painful episodes from his second marriage and the much publicized divorce are frankly detailed. Today Derek Humphry is regarded as the grand old man of a euthanasia movement in which he remains deeply involved. A dual citizen of the USA and the UK, he has lived in Oregon for 22 years.

Quotes
"Over the years, as a journalist, Derek Humphry has been involved in the exploration of more than one controversial subject. Listening to him review his career, from his native home in England to his present home in Oregon, I quickly sense that he thrives on sticky issues. 

"Derek Humphry is widely acknowledged to be the initiator of the euthanasia reform movement in the United States." 

"Final Exit is among the 25 most significant books published in the past quarter century." 

"If reporters could be cloned, I would clone Derek Humphry." 

"Because of his work he has been called a savior, a godsend, and an angel of mercy. He has also been called a murderer and a Nazi, has been compared to Jim Jones and Adolf Hitler, and has been assured that he will burn in hell." 

"Derek Humphry is a very dangerous man." Dame Cecily Saunders. On Dying Well. The Cambridge Review. 27 Feb. 1984. 50.>

"He left school at 15 and entered the profession of journalism at the bottom of the career ladder, as a messenger boy with the Yorkshire Post in London." 

"I've got the hardest selling job in America." 