Download or read book Is the Cemetery Dead written by David Charles Sloane and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-04-25 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Examines our evolving mourning rituals, specifically in relationship to cemeteries . . . a levelheaded report on the death care industry.” —Los Angeles Review of Books In modern society, we have professionalized our care for the dying and deceased in hospitals and hospices, churches and funeral homes, cemeteries and mausoleums to aid dazed and disoriented mourners. But these formal institutions can be alienating and cold, leaving people craving a more humane mourning and burial process. The burial treatment itself has come to be seen as wasteful and harmful—marked by chemicals, plush caskets, and manicured greens. Today’s bereaved are therefore increasingly turning away from the old ways of death and searching for a more personalized, environmentally responsible, and ethical means of grief. Is the Cemetery Dead? gets to the heart of the tragedy of death, chronicling how Americans are inventing new or adapting old traditions, burial places, and memorials. In illustrative prose, David Charles Sloane shows how people are taking control of their grief by bringing their relatives home to die, interring them in natural burial grounds, mourning them online, or memorializing them streetside with a shrine, ghost bike, or RIP mural. Today’s mourners are increasingly breaking free of conventions to better embrace the person they want to remember. As Sloane shows, these changes threaten the future of the cemetery, causing cemeteries to seek to become more responsive institutions. A trained historian, Sloane is also descendent from multiple generations of cemetery managers and he grew up in Syracuse’s Oakwood Cemetery. Enriched by these experiences, as well as his personal struggles with overwhelming grief, Sloane presents a remarkable and accessible tour of our new American way of death.
Download or read book Beautiful Death written by David Robinson and published by Penguin Press HC. This book was released on 1996 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of photographs from the burial grounds of Europe explores the beauty of cemeteries and the emotions the survivors of the dead placed into the making of the tombs.
Download or read book The Dead Hand Book written by Sara Richard and published by Source Point Press. This book was released on 2021-10-26 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Dead Hand Book is a memorial to mortality and the ancestral liaison with death through quiet and sweetly-macabre short stories. The Dead Hand Book is a memorial to mortality and the ancestral liaison with death through quiet and sweetly-macabre short stories. The collection of fables is inspired by the manner those long gone have had their memories engraved onto slate and marble stones with the cadence of an old Folk song or Murder Ballad. Tales of warning, the deepest loves honored by surviving paramours and the indifferent cruelty of life in the 17th-20th century are all recorded in the Stories From Gravesend Cemetery. The purpose of this book is to educate the casual cemetery wanderer about how to read the old stones they pass by and to excite the #deathpositivity movement enthusiast or morbidly curious. This book aims help honor those who have come before us by opening the door of understanding the strange records inscribed in old cemeteries; many of those interred below having only that record of their life existing on a crumbling stone. The stories are short and often open-ended to allow the reader to contemplate their interpretation of the endings, maybe even their own mortality. (Much like the way Edward Gorey crafted his short stories.) Modern attitudes towards death have become sodden with superstition, misinformation and fear; this book’s goal is to illuminate how those of the near past embraced, cared for, and honored death as an obvious part of life. Not long ago art was very much an integral part of funerary celebrations such as elaborate Memento Mori carvings on ancient gravestones and the hair jewelry of the Victorians. Those relics are celebrated in The Dead Hand Book.
Download or read book Massachusetts Book of the Dead written by Roxie J. Zwicker and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2009-02-11 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A historical tour of the Bay State’s oldest burial grounds—and the sometimes-spooky stories behind them. Massachusetts's historic graveyards are the final resting places for tales of the strange and supernatural. From Newburyport to Truro, these graveyards often frighten the living, but the dead who rest within them have stories to share with the world they left behind. While Giles Corey is said to haunt the Howard Street Cemetery in Salem, cursing those involved in the infamous witch trials, visitors to the Forest Hills Cemetery in Jamaica Plain enjoy an arboretum and a burial ground with Victorian-era memorials. One of the oldest cemeteries in Massachusetts, Old Burial Hill in Marblehead, has been the final resting place for residents for nearly 375 years. Author Roxie Zwicker tours the Bay State's oldest burial grounds, exploring the stones, stories and supernatural lore of these hallowed places. Includes photos
Download or read book Reimagining Death written by Lucinda Herring and published by North Atlantic Books. This book was released on 2019-01-08 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Honor your loved ones and the earth by choosing practical, spiritual, and eco-friendly after-death care Natural, legal, and innovative after-death care options are transforming the paradigm of the existing funeral industry, helping families and communities recover their instinctive capacity to care for a loved one after death and do so in creative and healing ways. Reimagining Death offers stories and guidance for home funeral vigils, advance after-death care directives, green burials, and conscious dying. When we bring art and beauty, meaningful ritual, and joy to ease our loss and sorrow, we are greening the gateway of death and returning home to ourselves, to the wisdom of our bodies, and to the earth.
Download or read book Near the Exit written by Lori Erickson and published by Westminster John Knox Press. This book was released on 2019-08-13 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An ideal guidebook to facing the inevitable." Foreword Reviews After her brother died unexpectedly and her mother moved into a dementia-care facility, spiritual travel writer and Episcopal deacon Lori Erickson felt called to a new quest: to face death head on, with the eye of a tourist and the heart of a pastor. Blending memoir, spirituality, and travel, Near the Exit examines how cultures confront and have confronted death, from Egypt's Valley of the Kings and Mayan temples, to a Colorado cremation pyre and Day of the Dead celebrations, to Maori settlements and tourist-destination graveyards. Erickson reflects on mortalityâ€"the ways we avoid it, the ways we cope with it, and the ways life is made more precious by accepting itâ€"in places as far away as New Zealand and as close as the nursing home up the street. Throughout her personal journey and her travels, Erickson  helps us to see that one of the most life-affirming things we can do is to invite death along for the ride.
Download or read book Making Space for the Dead written by Erin-Marie Legacey and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-04-15 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The dead of Paris, before the French Revolution, were most often consigned to mass graveyards that contemporaries described as terrible and terrifying, emitting "putrid miasmas" that were a threat to both health and dignity. In a book that is at once wonderfully macabre and exceptionally informative, Erin-Marie Legacey explores how a new burial culture emerged in Paris as a result of both revolutionary fervor and public health concerns, resulting in the construction of park-like cemeteries on the outskirts of the city and a vast underground ossuary. Making Space for the Dead describes how revolutionaries placed the dead at the center of their republican project of radical reinvention of French society and envisioned a future where graveyards would do more than safely contain human remains; they would serve to educate and inspire the living. Legacey unearths the unexpectedly lively process by which burial sites were reimagined, built, and used, focusing on three of the most important of these new spaces: the Paris Catacombs, Père Lachaise cemetery, and the short-lived Museum of French Monuments. By situating discussions of death and memory in the nation's broader cultural and political context, as well as highlighting how ordinary Parisians understood and experienced these sites, she shows how the treatment of the dead became central to the reconstruction of Parisian society after the Revolution.
Download or read book To Care for the Sick and Bury the Dead written by Leigh Ann Gardner and published by Vanderbilt University Press. This book was released on 2022-02-15 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Benevolent Orders, the Sons of Ham, Prince Hall Freemasons—these and other African American lodges created a social safety net for members across Tennessee. During their heyday between 1865 and 1930, these groups provided members with numerous resources, such as sick benefits and assurance of a proper burial, opportunities for socialization and leadership, and the chance to work with local churches and schools to create better communities. Many of these groups gradually faded from existence, but their legacy endures in the form of the cemeteries the lodges left behind. These Black cemeteries dot the Tennessee landscape, but few know their history or the societies of care they represent. To Care for the Sick and Bury the Dead is the first book-length look at these cemeteries and the lodges that fostered them. This book is a must-have for genealogists, historians, and family members of the people buried in these cemeteries.
Download or read book Death and Rebirth in a Southern City written by Ryan K. Smith and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2020-11-17 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This exploration of Richmond's burial landscape over the past 300 years reveals in illuminating detail how racism and the color line have consistently shaped death, burial, and remembrance in this storied Southern capital. Richmond, Virginia, the former capital of the Confederacy, holds one of the most dramatic landscapes of death in the nation. Its burial grounds show the sweep of Southern history on an epic scale, from the earliest English encounters with the Powhatan at the falls of the James River through slavery, the Civil War, and the long reckoning that followed. And while the region's deathways and burial practices have developed in surprising directions over these centuries, one element has remained stubbornly the same: the color line. But something different is happening now. The latest phase of this history points to a quiet revolution taking place in Virginia and beyond. Where white leaders long bolstered their heritage and authority with a disregard for the graves of the disenfranchised, today activist groups have stepped forward to reorganize and reclaim the commemorative landscape for the remains of people of color and religious minorities. In Death and Rebirth in a Southern City, Ryan K. Smith explores more than a dozen of Richmond's most historically and culturally significant cemeteries. He traces the disparities between those grounds which have been well-maintained, preserving the legacies of privileged whites, and those that have been worn away, dug up, and built over, erasing the memories of African Americans and indigenous tribes. Drawing on extensive oral histories and archival research, Smith unearths the heritage of these marginalized communities and explains what the city must do to conserve these gravesites and bring racial equity to these arenas for public memory. He also shows how the ongoing recovery efforts point to a redefinition of Confederate memory and the possibility of a rebirthed community in the symbolic center of the South. The book encompasses, among others, St. John's colonial churchyard; African burial grounds in Shockoe Bottom and on Shockoe Hill; Hebrew Cemetery; Hollywood Cemetery, with its 18,000 Confederate dead; Richmond National Cemetery; and Evergreen Cemetery, home to tens of thousands of black burials from the Jim Crow era. Smith's rich analysis of the surviving grounds documents many of these sites for the first time and is enhanced by an accompanying website, www.richmondcemeteries.org. A brilliant example of public history, Death and Rebirth in a Southern City reveals how cemeteries can frame changes in politics and society across time.
Download or read book Necropolis City of the Dead written by Mark Davis and published by Amberley Publishing Limited. This book was released on 2015-03-15 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating history of Undercliffe Victorian Cemetery - 'works of art', created as much for the living as they were for the dead.
Download or read book Cemetery Boys written by Aiden Thomas and published by Swoon Reads. This book was released on 2020-09-01 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A trans boy determined to prove his gender to his traditional Latinx family summons a ghost who refuses to leave in Aiden Thomas's New York Times-bestselling paranormal YA debut Cemetery Boys, described by Entertainment Weekly as "groundbreaking." Yadriel has summoned a ghost, and now he can't get rid of him. When his traditional Latinx family has problems accepting his true gender, Yadriel becomes determined to prove himself a real brujo. With the help of his cousin and best friend Maritza, he performs the ritual himself, and then sets out to find the ghost of his murdered cousin and set it free. However, the ghost he summons is actually Julian Diaz, the school's resident bad boy, and Julian is not about to go quietly into death. He's determined to find out what happened and tie off some loose ends before he leaves. Left with no choice, Yadriel agrees to help Julian, so that they can both get what they want. But the longer Yadriel spends with Julian, the less he wants to let him leave. Praise for Cemetery Boys: Longlisted for the National Book Award "The novel perfectly balances the vibrant, energetic Latinx culture while delving into heavy topics like LGBTQ+ acceptance, deportation, colonization, and racism within authoritative establishments." —TeenVogue.com "This stunning debut novel from Thomas is detailed, heart-rending, and immensely romantic. I was bawling by the end of it, but not from sadness: I just felt so incredibly happy that this queer Latinx adventure will get to be read by other kids. Cemetery Boys is necessary: for trans kids, for queer kids, for those in the Latinx community who need to see themselves on the page. Don’t miss this book." —Mark Oshiro, author of Anger is a Gift
Download or read book The Whole Town s Talking written by Fannie Flagg and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Elmwood Springs, Missouri, is a small town like any other, but something strange is happening out at the cemetery. 'Still Meadows, ' as it's called, is anything but still. Tells a surprising story of life, afterlife, and the mysterious goings-on of ordinary people"--Amazon.com.
Download or read book The Family Tree Cemetery Field Guide written by Joy Neighbors and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2017-10-20 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Not all research can be done from home--sometimes you have to head into the field. Cemeteries are crucial for any genealogist's search, and this book will show you how to search for and analyze your ancestors' graves. Discover tools for locating tombstones, tips for traipsing through cemeteries, an at-a-glance guide to frequently used gravestone icons, and practical strategies for on-the-ground research. And once you've returned home, learn how to incorporate gravestone information into your research, as well as how to upload grave locations to BillionGraves and record your findings in memorial pages on Find A Grave. • Detailed step-by-step guides to finding ancestors' cemeteries using websites like Find A Grave, plus how to record and preserve death and burial information • Tips and strategies for navigating cemeteries and finding individual tombstones in the field, plus an at-a-glance guide to tombstone symbols and iconography • Resources and techniques for discovering other death records and incorporating information from cemeteries into genealogical research
Download or read book Greening Death written by Suzanne Kelly and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2015-09-01 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We once disposed of our dead in earth-friendly ways—no chemicals, biodegradable containers, dust to dust. But over the last 150 years death care has become a toxic, polluting, and alienating industry in the United States. Today, people are slowly waking up to the possibility of more sustainable and less disaffecting death care, reclaiming old practices in new ways, in a new age. Greening Death traces the philosophical and historical backstory to this awakening, captures the passionate on-the-ground work of the Green Burial Movement, and explores the obstacles and other challenges getting in the way of more robust mobilization. As the movement lays claim to greener, simpler, and more cost-efficient practices, something even more promising is being offered up—a tangible way of restoring our relationship to nature.
Download or read book 199 Cemeteries to See Before You Die written by Loren Rhoads and published by Black Dog & Leventhal. This book was released on 2017-10-24 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A hauntingly beautiful travel guide to the world's most visited cemeteries, told through spectacular photography andtheir unique histories and residents. More than 3.5 million tourists flock to Paris's Pè Lachaise cemetery each year.They are lured there, and to many cemeteries around the world, by a combination of natural beauty, ornate tombstones and crypts, notable residents, vivid history, and even wildlife. Many also visit Mount Koya cemetery in Japan, where 10,000 lanterns illuminate the forest setting, or graveside in Oaxaca, Mexico to witness Day of the Dead fiestas. Savannah's Bonaventure Cemetery has gorgeous night tours of the Southern Gothic tombstones under moss-covered trees that is one of the most popular draws of the city. 199 Cemeteries to See Before You Die features these unforgettable cemeteries, along with 196 more, seen in more than 300 photographs. In this bucket list of travel musts, author Loren Rhoads, who hosts the popular Cemetery Travel blog, details the history and features that make each destination unique. Throughout will be profiles of famous people buried there, striking memorials by noted artists, and unusual elements, such as the hand carved wood grave markers in the Merry Cemetery in Romania.
Download or read book Over My Dead Body written by Raymond Flynn and published by Hodder & Stoughton. This book was released on 2013-11-21 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Someone is blackmailing a local supermarket chain. And getting away with it, thanks to a very clever payoff method involving hole-in-the-wall bank machines and a bit of glaring police incompetence. When the blackmailers descend on Eddathorpe, Robert Graham is called in. He thinks it's an inside job - and sets out to prove it. He doesn't know the case is going to escalate from fraud to murder; or that its unravelling could change his life...
Download or read book The Graveyard Book written by Neil Gaiman and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2010-09-28 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It takes a graveyard to raise a child. Nobody Owens, known as Bod, is a normal boy. He would be completely normal if he didn't live in a graveyard, being raised by ghosts, with a guardian who belongs to neither the world of the living nor the dead. There are adventures in the graveyard for a boy—an ancient Indigo Man, a gateway to the abandoned city of ghouls, the strange and terrible Sleer. But if Bod leaves the graveyard, he will be in danger from the man Jack—who has already killed Bod's family.
