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American Afterlife: Encounters In The Customs Of Mourning
University of Georgia Press
ISBN13:
9780820350585
$20.95
$19.03
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 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 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 death-obsessed 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.
- | Author: Kate Sweeney
- | Publisher: University Of Georgia Press
- | Publication Date: Oct 01, 2016
- | Number of Pages: 232 pages
- | Language: English
- | Binding: Paperback/Social Science
- | ISBN-10: 0820350583
- | ISBN-13: 9780820350585
- Author:
- Kate Sweeney
- Publisher:
- University Of Georgia Press
- Publication Date:
- Oct 01, 2016
- Number of pages:
- 232 pages
- Language:
- English
- Binding:
- Paperback/Social Science
- ISBN-10:
- 0820350583
- ISBN-13:
- 9780820350585