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Dying to eat: cross-cultural perspectives on food, death and the afterlife

concepts’ so that a variety of topics are brought into discussion: the inevitability of death that generates fear, avoidance and over-protectionism, the negative and positive sides of death, the afterlife possibilities. What characterizes children’s approaches is flexibility and personal adaptation of cultural interpretative patterns. Notwithstanding the book’s merits, sometimes the author appears to overestimate children’s capacity to understand things related to death, equating their narratives of death with authentic responses to death and the grasp of its meanings. Not too often though, there are times when the author’s desire to empower children and erase the culturally imposed distance between them and the adult world risks becoming if not ideological, at least uncovered by facts (see the concept of small deaths). Coombs seems often to focus more on their creative and critical approaches to death and overlook the traditional, stereotypic or shallow ones. Also, seeing any popular culture source of death as automatically being a trigger of death awareness might not be the best option. However, these points do not overshadow the excellent research findings of this book, which makes clear not only that children can and should talk about death, but also that adults – parents, societies, academics – should (carefully!) listen to them.