The Fireside Book of Death: A Macabre Guide to the Ultimate Experience

by Robert Wilkins

Modern medicine has made death remote from our everyday experience, yet perhaps for this very reason we remain acutely conscious of our own mortality, and the physical aspects of death still arouse feelings of enormous unease. This is an examination of the secular side of death, consisting of bizarre and irreverent anecdotes and illustrated with grisly images. The author, a psychiatrist, writes with humour and an eye for the off-beat. He concentrates on the macabre, and records the lengths to which men and women throughout history have gone to cope with such fears as premature burial, posthumous indignity and bodily disintegration - not to mention simple obscurity. The book's topics include embalming, mummification, necrophilia and grave-robbing, and range from eccentric tombs to methods of embalming; from freakish deaths to the Necropolis Railway which once ran from Waterloo Station; from Emma, Countess of Mount Edgcumbe, who while lying in state in the family chapel awoke to find a sexton stealing her rings, to Count Karnice-Karnicki's contraption which would sound sirens and flash lights if a "corpse" were to stir in its coffin.

Genres: Nonfiction

256 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1990

Reviews

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful, macabre wander through the fascinating subject of death. Covering the lengths people have gone to to avoid premature burial; fear of posthumous indignity, bodily disintegration, of being forgotten or of an ignominious death. Even more fun than horrible histories. Find a copy if you can.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first read this book when it came out in the 90's and went back to it just before reading A Tomb With A View. It is just as fascinating now as it was then, the subject is treated with respect and well placed dark humour. From grave robbing and the Resurrection Men, the state of pestilential graveyards in Victorian London, the fear of premature burial and cryogenics and much else besides, the book is easy to read without ever becoming sensationalist or flippant.

[Kain · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bardzo fajna książka, niecodzienna, choć o codzienności - starając się nie myśleć o śmierci, nawet nie myślimy ile tematów i obaw się z nią wiąże. Kto by pomyślał wręcz, że tematyka śmierci, pochówku itp. może być bardzo ciekawa?
Jeśli chodzi zaś o język - angielski tu jest na tyle bogaty, że było mi niełatwo. Dobrze, że jest google translator ;)

[Moggy]

I love this book (thanks Kitty, for buying it for me all those years ago!). I reread this one lots and have done a bit of a mini-pilgramage to some of the places (Palermo, the London cemeteries and the surgical museum, Greyfriars churchyard). It's a corker.

[Pat Druid · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gruesome and fascinating and full of the type of interesting facts that you can pull out and use to disgust your friends (so long as you don't mind people thinking you are a morbid weirdo).
I LOVE THIS BOOK :-)