Embracing Our Mortality captures medical and ethical decision-making in action at the end of life-- the context in which individual physicians'and patients' decisions about care and perhaps most heightened. The author, an internist and biomedical ethicist recognized for his seminal work on medical futiliity and living wills, blends vivid case studies from his practice with evidence-based insights from the medical literature and intuitive lessons from literary classics to show how the persistent denial of death in both our culture at large and the high-tech culture of medicine interfered with providing the best possible care for people near the end of life. The book is of interest to biomedical ethicists, physicians caring for patients at the end of life, residents and fellows in palliative medicine, and medical and advanced undergraduate students in courses on Biomedical Ethics and Death & Dying. The book, written in a lively, accessible style, also attracts readers among laypeople.