This, Becker’s final book, was in progress at the time of his death. It extends the thesis presented in The Denial of Death, that the terror of death is the root motivation for individual behavior, into the social and cultural life of human beings. It is thus in a very real sense a companion volume to the earlier work. However, the book is somewhat uneven, in that some of the chapters are full-length and quite polished, while other chapters are just a few pages and quite sketchy. Because the book was never brought to completion by Becker, in a very real sense many chapters in this book are themselves abstracts of what would have been the finished volume. It is composed of ten chapters. One of the original chapters Becker pulled and published as the journal article ‘Toward the merger of animal and human studies’ (1974).