Smoke Gets in Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory

I've recently seen some of the Youtube videos of the author and then I realised hey, she had a book (and for a couple of days now, another one :D), a short little non-fiction thing with a pleasantly simple cover. I'm not really a non-fiction reader, she seems cool, the topic is interesting, so might as well give it a go.

One of the topics the book deals with through anecdotes is our relationship with death. According to Ms. Doughty the problem is our own unwillingness to even just... acknowledge it and how he just can't face our own mortality. How back in the day the dead were laying around at home, how in different cultures they used to do this, that or the other. How it was all more dignified, I guess. Healthier for sure.
But this is where my issue comes from this; I don't necessarily agree. I can't really blame people for not just... being okay with it. Like this is one of those topics when I understand what she is trying to say and I can see her point, but at times it felt like she couldn't really relate to the average person.

I really enjoyed the first part of the book, her being new to the whole death-business, something that is not as clear to the normal person as, lets say, being a teacher or a cook. It was all kind of funny and not too solemn.
Then by the end... she felt like she kind of drifted towards a certain kind of pathos that I really, really wanted to avoid with this. Philosophical musings and all. Not really my thing.

Sometimes it also felt like for someone who was so much about breaking the groupthink, she... kind of also fell into the same mistakes with other topics.
Close to the very end she talks, in a kind of annoyed and disgusted way about how it's almost always white men, super privileged and all who want to prolong their lives and how it's unfair to the poor. Also, when talking about traditions and such, she mostly seems to have an issue with Western people, while all the others are someone elevated though their rituals being so... different. In my younger years I've spend quite a bit of time among more traditional gypsies (calm down, they call THEMSELVES that), some of them being in my own family. If you see people easily spooked by the dead, fearful of death to the extreme and super serious about superstitions with death/your soul being taken/dead bodies, etc. it is them. Somehow she kind of seems to... come with certain prejudices of her own regarding modern Western ways being horrible and cowardly, while everyone else from anywhere or anytime different being good.

Overall, it was a fun, short read, but in some ways I couldn't emotionally connect when I really didn't even want big emotions and such. I just wanted objective things, to know more. I don't really know what else to say about a non-fiction thing. Sorry.