Description
Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.
Grave takes a ground-level view of how burial sites have transformed over time and how they continue to change. As a cemetery tour guide, Allison C. Meier has spent more time walking among tombstones than most. Even for her, the grave has largely been invisible, an out of the way and unobtrusive marker of death. However, graves turn out to be not always so subtle, reverent, or permanent. While the indigent and unidentified have frequently been interred in mass graves, a fate brought into the public eye during the COVID-19 pandemic, the practice today is not unlike burials in the potter's fields of the colonial era. Burial is not the only option, of course, and Meier analyzes the rise of cremation, green burial, and new practices like human composting, investigating what is next for the grave and how existing spaces of death can be returned to community life.Object Lessons
Trade ReviewBeautifully written and filled with empathy and insight,
Grave is a rumination over the how and why of human burial, complete with a slew of little known historical tidbits pulled together from years of the author’s fascination with the topic. It should be considered essential reading for anyone interested in funerary history, especially in the United States. * Paul Koudounaris, author of Heavenly Bodies, Memento Mori, and Empire of Death: A Cultural History of Ossuaries and Charnel Houses *
A thorough, insightful survey of the past, present, and future of the grave, and how humanity has grappled with the many problems and possibilities it represents. With compassion and an uncommon eye for detail, Allison Meier examines how the grave has functioned as a site of social inequality for centuries, and how a mixture of new technology and a revival of older practices may enliven cemeteries as sites of renewed community meaning. * Bess Lovejoy, author of Rest in Pieces: The Curious Fates of Famous Corpses (2016) *
Table of Contents1. The Grave: Our House of Eternity 2. Navigating Through Necrogeography 3. The Living and the Dead 4. The Privilege of Permanence 5. An Eternal Room of Our Own 6. No Resting Place 7. To Decay or Not to Decay 8. New Ideas for the Afterlife 9. Dead Space
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