A sweeping history of America as seen through its gravestones, graveyards, and burial practices, stunningly illustrated with eighty black-and-white photographs.
Cemeteries and burial grounds, as illuminated by acclaimed cultural historian Marilyn Yalom, are unique windows onto our religious, ethnic, and deeply human history as Americans. This dedicated mother-son team visited hundreds of cemeteries while developing The American Resting Place, following a coast-to-coast and north-to-south trajectory that mirrors the vast historic pattern of American immigration.
Yalom delivers incisive, often poignant accounts of how gravestone epigraphs reveal changing ideas about death and personal identity; who is buried next to whom and why; when and why cemeteries are moved; and how class and gender play out in stone. Rich particulars include:
- the story of one seventeenth-century Bostonian who amassed a thousand pairs of gloves in his funeral-going lifetime
- burial rites and unique funerary symbols in today's Indian cultures
- a Czech community brought uncannily to life in the crematorium of Chicago's National Bohemian Cemetery
From fascinating past to startling future--DVDs embedded in tombstones, green burials, and "the new aesthetic of death"--The American Resting Place is the definitive history of the American cemetery.
