American Afterlife - 9780820346007

Someone dies. What happens next?

One family inters their matriarch’s ashes on the floor of the ocean. Another holds a memorial weenie roast each year at a greenburial cemetery. An 1898 ad for embalming fluid promises, “You can make mummies with it!” while a leading contemporary burial vault is touted as impervious to the elements. A grieving mother, 150 years ago, might spend her days tending a garden at her daughter’s grave. Today, she might tend the roadside memorial she erected at the spot her daughter was killed. One mother wears a locket containing her daughter’s hair; the other, a necklace containing her ashes.

What happens after someone dies depends on our personal stories and on where those stories fall in a larger tale—that of death in America. It’s a powerful tale that we usually keep hidden from our everyday lives until we have to face it.

American Afterlife by Kate Sweeney reveals this world through a collective portrait of Americans past and present who find themselves personally involved with death: a klatch of obit writers in the desert, a funeral voyage on the Atlantic, a fourth-generation funeral director—even a midwestern museum that takes us back in time to meet our deathobsessed Victorian progenitors. Each story illuminates details in another until something larger is revealed: a landscape that feels at once strange and familiar, one that’s by turns odd, tragic, poignant, and sometimes even funny.

Informazioni bibliografiche

• Titolo del Libro in lingua: American Afterlife
• Sottotitolo: Encounters in the Customs of Mourning
• Lingua: English
• Autore:  Kate Sweeney
• Editore: Univ of Georgia Pr
• Collana: Univ of Georgia Pr (Hardcover)
• Data di Pubblicazione: 15 Marzo '14
• Genere: SOCIAL SCIENCE
• Argomenti :  Funeral rites and ceremonies United States Mourning customs United States Undertakers and undertaking United States
• Dimensioni mm: 215 x 139 x 0
• EAN-13: 9780820346007