This is the last of five volumes in the Death, Meaning and Values series. With the main heading Death and Bereavement Around the World, the series covers many areas that should be of interest to many readers of this journal – academic, professional and practitioners. To set the context for a review of this final volume, Reflective Essays, the preceding texts' sub-titles were as follows: Volume 1, Major Religious Traditions, 2002; Volume 2, Death and Bereavement in the Americas, 2003; Volume 3, Death and Bereavement in Europe, 2004; Volume 4, Death and Bereavement in Asia, Australia and Australasia, 2005. The ‘General Introduction’ to the series explains that the focus is on the processes of dying and grieving and speaks of the ways in which people engage – understand, feel and act – with the ‘death systems’ that are, the editors argue, culturally specific. Addressing the diversity of views, attitudes and behaviours around death and grief is the stated aim of the series, with the lens trained on the concerns of ‘real’ people and practicalities rather than on theoretical positioning. That said, there is some referenced preliminary positioning in an introduction to the series at the start of this volume. Here the variables that distinguish death systems are summarised and contrasts are noted between the more and less developed worlds. That everyone involved in care should acknowledge the importance of cultural influences on the meaning of death and the rituals of dying, burial and commemoration is heavily underlined.

Published in 2009, the contributors to this volume had time to reflect on the wide coverage already gathered and edited by John Morgan and Pittu Laungani, but also had to reflect on the deaths of both editors between 2005 and 2007 – Stephen Palmer completed the tasks. Thus, with tributes and the inclusion of the 1997 transcript of a conversation between the two deceased editors, this final volume is more than a collection of chapters and distinctively reflective of real people, personally known it seems, to all the contributors. Systematic theorising and explanatory aims do not feature in this final volume planned, as the surviving editor notes, ‘to allow space for contributors to reflect on life and death and the major themes related to living and dying: death and after-life, the role of religion, spirituality, the performance of rites and rituals, secularist approaches, cultural variations, suicide and a variety of other related problems’ (p. 14). The original idea of reflecting on insights offered in the preceding volumes had shifted, as Stephen Palmer suggests in his conclusion, by the introduction of new topics including: end-of-life care, gender differences, children, roadside memorials and the significance of using or avoiding names of the deceased. Insofar as the original aim was intended as a summing up, if not synthesis, it has been somewhat obscured. There is, then, a certain randomness to the volume's contents and styles which the reader has to navigate.

Many of the chapters build on personal experience and offer material that may be classed as anecdotal; some espouse a cause and carry a particular message; and some offer specific guidelines. For instance, the chapter on children draws on the author's teaching and parental experience but also suggests practical ways in which questioning about death might be handled. An Anglican priest also recounts challenging experiences with bereaved people and gives several lists of issues which practitioners could adopt when, for instance, helping bereaved people in spiritual doubt and turmoil. These are both long chapters as is ‘Ritual: making special: the right of every griever’, which is constructed in such a free-flowing way that the reader is never sure what is round the next corner, from questions as to why people need rituals through some 40 sub-headings to predictions for the future of funeral ritual and culminating in a call for ‘intolerance for ineffective ritual’. The chapters vary in length and organisation, with latitude rather than precise focus the predominant style. So we find the losses associated with domestic violence discussed in a chapter on ‘Spirituality’, with a useful distinction between trauma and bereavement, whilst ‘Death and bereavement in Romania’ appears to be displaced from Volume 3; it has interesting detail and makes an important point about the place of bereavement in transitional cultures.

This variation and some unevenness in the presentation of material and argument is in line, perhaps, with the overall aim to deal with ‘real’ lives and experiences. It may also reflect the circumstances in which the final editing had to be managed. Nonetheless, the chapters could, if approached selectively, be of considerable value to practitioners. All the contributors appear to be practising at some level in counselling, palliative-medico settings and pastoral/hospice care. Many are involved in parallel training and teaching and most allude to, or claim, a particular religious connection. Collectively, they represent a broad global spread of experience. Each chapter has a bibliography, some have suggestions for further reading and the volume has a comprehensive (13-page) index.