The Lazarus Syndrome: Burial Alive and Other Horrors of the Undead by Rodney Davies
Well, silly silly me. I picked up this book thinking that it might be science... kind of.... well, history of science, or at least history of medicine.... at least tangentially... well, no, honestly, I picked up the book because it looked morbid and sensationalistic, but I _was_ under the impression that it might have some facts in it.
And it did have some facts in it, but as far as I can tell they all got in there by accident. And the author does his best to disguise them with several clever tactics - not providing footnotes, for instance, or even primary sources for many of his tales of terror. He discusses anecdotes from the 16th century on the same footing as medically verified instances from a few years ago, and indeed at one point tosses in, apparently just for kicks, the plot of the last act of Romeo and Juliet, without distinguishing it from the (allegedly) true stories. Even when his material is not drawn from great works of clearly fictional literature, he seems to have a shaky grasp of what, exactly, constitutes evidence.
All this is to the service of a central thesis that, while certainly as morbid and sensationalistic as I had hoped, is somewhat lacking in other departments. Basically, the author holds that the only certain way to be sure that a person is dead is to allow them to decompose noticeably. To do anything as far as disposal of the body before rot sets in is to potentially allow your loved one to be buried, burned, or dissected alive. And when he says that any non-rotten body may potentially be alive, he means it - he discusses at some length the supposed case of a man who remained underwater for sixteen days and nevertheless recovered, along with the 'evidence' for the continued responsiveness of severed heads to stimuli. To say nothing of the chapter on near death experiences, because I'm a little prejudiced about NDEs. Then again, I'm prejudiced about them because most of the evidence for them consists of crap very much like this chapter.
Long review short, you might as well read a Robin Cook novel for a responsible discussion of death as this piece of shit. This is a prime example of the sort of irresponsibility that is swamps those portions of the "nonfiction" publishing industry that care more about popularity than accuracy with the connivance of a public that would rather be titillated than informed. Come to find out, the author's other books are all about "unexplained" phenomena and New Age topics. Surprise, surprise.