American Afterlife: Encounters in the Customs of Mourning
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- Synopsis
- An award-winning writer explores the patchwork American cultural history of grieving the departed.One family inters their matriarch&’s ashes on the floor of the ocean. Another holds a memorial weenie roast each year at a green-burial 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 where 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 are personally involved with death: obit writers in the desert, an Atlantic funeral voyage, a fourth-generation funeral director―even a midwestern museum that shows us our death-obsessed Victorian progenitors. Each story illuminates details in another, revealing a landscape that feels at once strange and familiar, one that&’s by turns odd, tragic, poignant, and sometimes even funny.&“Sweeney&’s quest for the &“why&” behind mourning rituals has given us a book in the best tradition of narrative journalism.&”—Jessica Handler, author of Braving the Fire: A Guide to Writing about Grief and Loss
- Copyright:
- 2014
Book Details
- Book Quality:
- Publisher Quality
- Book Size:
- 232 Pages
- ISBN-13:
- 9780820346892
- Related ISBNs:
- 9780820346007
- Publisher:
- University of Georgia Press
- Date of Addition:
- 09/15/23
- Copyrighted By:
- Kate Sweeney
- Adult content:
- No
- Language:
- English
- Has Image Descriptions:
- No
- Categories:
- Nonfiction, Social Studies
- Submitted By:
- Bookshare Staff
- Usage Restrictions:
- This is a copyrighted book.