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Death and Bodies.

Physician and author Kenneth Iserson, M.D. Iserson wanted to promote organ and tissue donation. So he wrote a book about what happens to dead bodies. It's called "Death to Dust" (Galen Press). Iserson believes that death is the pornography of our culture. He says that after-death activities are shrouded in secrecy. His book explores the mundane--burial choices and advance directives--and the arcane--head shrinking, cannibalism and cryonic preservation.

22:49
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Other segments from the episode on May 3, 1994

Fresh Air with Terry Gross, May 3, 1994: Interview with Kenneth Iserson; Review of Hole's album "Live Through This"; Interview with Murray Kempton; Review of the films "With Honors" and "PCU."
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11:58

One of the Greatest of Living Newspaper Men.

Columnist and commentator Murray Kempton. The New Yorker says he's "surely among the greatest of all living newspapermen" . . . "the one true original in the business." For years he wrote a column for the old New York Post. Now he writes for New York Newsday and The New York Review of Books. At 76, he bicycles around Manhattan in his elegant attire to gather material for his columns on the City's "rebels, losers and rascals." His latest book is a collection of his newspaper pieces.

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22:33

The Myth of Death with Dignity.

Dr. Sherwin Nuland is a surgeon, and he teaches surgery and the history of medicine at Yale. In his new book, "How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter," (Knopf), he writes that few of us have an understanding of the way people die because 80 percent of Americans die in the hospital, and, for the most part their deaths are concealed. Nuland's new book is an attempt to "demythologize" the process of dying and he presents death in its biological and clinical reality.

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40:02

Poet and Undertaker Thomas Lynch.

Poet and undertaker Thomas Lynch has combined his two occupations to produce his new book, "The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade." (W. W. Norton) The work is a collection of essays whose topics range from the scheme to use cemeteries as golf courses to poignant stories from his twenty year career as an undertaker. Lynch says he thinks that the meaning of life is connected to death, and his book primarily discusses the impact of the dead on the living.

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52:30

Daughter of Warhol star looks back on a bohemian childhood in the Chelsea Hotel

Alexandra Auder's mother, Viva, was one of Andy Warhol's muses. Growing up in Warhol's orbit meant Auder's childhood was an unusual one. For several years, Viva, Auder and Auder's younger half-sister, Gaby Hoffmann, lived in the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan. It was was famous for having been home to Leonard Cohen, Dylan Thomas, Virgil Thomson, and Bob Dylan, among others.

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43:04

This fake 'Jury Duty' really put James Marsden's improv chops on trial

In the series Jury Duty, a solar contractor named Ronald Gladden has agreed to participate in what he believes is a documentary about the experience of being a juror--but what Ronald doesn't know is that the whole thing is fake.

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