Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory

The book is overall nice. It has really high highs and really low lows, in my opinion.

The author clearly has a lot of knowledge about the death industry and the history of death practices/rituals around the world. I absolutely adored reading about it, and expanding my knowledge of death, which is.. everywhere. We just don't see it often, because, as the author correctly points out, it's now considered taboo to talk about in many places. And the funeral and medical industries do everything they can to hide it.

My main problem with the book, the reason for the low rating, is because of how condescending the author is in this book. I can't stress that enough since it's a perfect word to describe it. It's that type of condescension where you, as a reader, aren't even mad, or entertained by it. You're just.. unamused just enough to lift an eyebrow in an ‘Are you serious?’ kind of way. I would describe my reactions as an epitome of: ‘Who asked?’, and, ‘Did you think that your condescending comments made the book better?’. The thing is, I'm not sure if the author is aware of how condescending she was at times, which made it worse.

(Examples which are spoilers: she was condescending about a man who committed suicide, about a dead woman with face mold, about anything and everything she found odd.)

My other massive pet peeve about this book is the name-dropping of everything. Books, people, movies, songs, etc. It makes the book feel very dated. My complaint might be nitpicky, so I decided to include everything that the author name-dropped. This probably isn't everything:

Six Feet Under(2 times), Stand by Me, Twilight of the Idols, The Lion King, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Indiana Jones, The Land Before Time, Pulp Fiction, Washington Post, CBS NEWS, Death and the Maiden, On Cannibals, Addams Family, Weekend at Bernie’s, The Shroud, The Western Undertaker, The Sunnyside, Malleus Maleficarum, The Big Lebowski, Duck Baby, Time(magazine), The Loved One, JK Rowling, The American Way of Death(9 times), New York Times(2 times), Supernanny, Consumer Reports, CSI, Law & Order, The Scream, Titanic, The Little Mermaid(2 times), Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, L’Homme devant la mort, The Torture Garden, Real Housewives, Disneyland, Explosion in a Cathedral, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, Nightmare Before Christmas, Moby-Dick, Soylent Green, Wizard of Oz, Moonlight Sonata, Triumph over Temptation, Topics in Hemorrhoids, New Yorker, Younger Next Year, The Fountain of Age, Ageless, The Sexy Years, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology.

Now that you've read that(you haven't, I know. At best, you skimmed over it. We can be honest, I don't blame you), I think you can agree that it's excessive, and that I felt petty enough to write all of that out for a good reason.

Here's some quick math. I mentioned 67 things. I definitely missed some, but let's say 67. The book has 255 pages in my version, so let's do simple math: 255÷67. The result is 3.8. On average, the author mentions some work every 3.8 pages. That's absolutely insane - in a derogatory kind of way, honestly.

Anyway, the book did teach me a lot of things, but I don't feel justified in giving it more than 3.5 stars and round it down to 3. It does get better by the end, to be fair.

What a great read! Definitely would recommend.

The incredible book and worthwhile to read.