The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains

by Thomas W. Laqueur

The Greek philosopher Diogenes said that when he died his body should be tossed over the city walls for beasts to scavenge. Why should he or anyone else care what became of his corpse? In The Work of the Dead, acclaimed cultural historian Thomas Laqueur examines why humanity has universally rejected Diogenes’s argument. No culture has been indifferent to mortal remains. Even in our supposedly disenchanted scientific age, the dead body still matters—for individuals, communities, and nations. A remarkably ambitious history, The Work of the Dead offers a compelling and richly detailed account of how and why the living have cared for the dead, from antiquity to the twentieth century.

The book draws on a vast range of sources—from mortuary archaeology, medical tracts, letters, songs, poems, and novels to painting and landscapes in order to recover the work that the dead do for the living: making human communities that connect the past and the future. Laqueur shows how the churchyard became the dominant resting place of the dead during the Middle Ages and why the cemetery largely supplanted it during the modern period. He traces how and why since the nineteenth century we have come to gather the names of the dead on great lists and memorials and why being buried without a name has become so disturbing. And finally, he tells how modern cremation, begun as a fantasy of stripping death of its history, ultimately failed—and how even the ashes of the victims of the Holocaust have been preserved in culture.

A fascinating chronicle of how we shape the dead and are in turn shaped by them, this is a landmark work of cultural history.

Genres: History, Death, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Sociology, Anthropology, Science

736 pages, Hardcover

First published October 6, 2015

About the author

Thomas W. Laqueur is an American historian, sexologist and writer.
He is the author of Solitary Sex : A Cultural History of Masturbation and Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud as well as many articles and reviews. He is the winner of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's 2007 Distinguished Achievement Award and is Professor of History at the University of California.

Reviews

[Diogenes Grief · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Billions and billions of the dead--at least 90 percent and probably nearer to 95 percent of all who ever died--have disappeared without leaving a name behind" (p. 431). We could, with every footfall, be walking over the dust of the dead.

Argh, I finally finished this lumbering behemoth of a book. While being a true work of scholarship, in the most boring sense of the term, Laqueuer's Herculean effort of tackling the mightiest of elephants in the room of "Western" society (i.e., Death, with a capital D), is noble, necessary, and terribly elucidating for the layperson, the college student, and the intellectually and existentially curious. However, this book is also a slow grind to read, at least for me. While the main theme is to focus on the idea of, treatment of, Death and the Dead, post-Enlightenment, with a narrowed focus on the U.K. (and later in the "necronominalism" of the U.S.), religiously, philosophically, culturally, politically, and socially, it takes Laqueur some 180 pages to even get to Martin Luther, Voltaire, and David Hume. Time after time, it seems, this work is riddled with repetitious thoughts and directed along a serpentine course that gets madly muddled. Chapters have introductory pages, sections have introductions paragraphs-long, and subsections often have some reflective introduction with sprinkled signposts letting the reader know where he or she stands on this journey. The use of endnotes over footnotes, also (to me) is tough since I like footnotes (I mean, come on, even Max Brooks used them expertly in fiction) and they are much cited in the text here.

One glaring oversight I found was Socrates being cited for what Plato wrote. Such a missed editing issue automatically makes me wonder what other tiny missteps hide within the pages. Please don't get me wrong. This is a profound work of scholarship that must have taken an incredible amount of time to research and write. Blending history on all its layers with anthropology, cultural psychology, etymology, necrogeography, etc. is nothing short of tough. At 550 lead-dense pages, with almost 80 pages of endnotes, such an undertaking is worthy of accolades; yet, I wonder if this subject couldn't be more easily construed for readers outside lofty academic circles (for the record, I have two Master's degrees with a long-ago undergrad minor in Philosophy: ignorant I am not). With 180 pages of appetizers expended trying to build up to the main course, there seems a sadly missed opportunity to tie Greco-Roman, pre-Christian Jewish, and pre-Islam Arab practices/belief systems/mindsets of death, the dying, and the dead together, as they all contribute to the construction of institutional Christian thought, never mind the romantic idolatry and pervasive iconography of such themes transforming throughout history.

What I do love is using my hero-god Diogenes as the keystone to this entire book. No greater person could fill the Cynic's dirty, unshod, philosophical feet regarding this topic.

Perhaps it's just the author's writing style. If so, such a style will probably never reach a wide audience, and maybe that's just fine, but I wish the issues of death and dying were more pronounced in culture. That is not a macabre statement at all. Coming from a Buddhist perspective, death is inevitable and should not be feared. We live, we die. Reading this history of perception and practice gifted me with greater clarity into how the individual mindset, swamped by external and historical forces, shapes one's worldview concerning death and dying. By "worldview" I mean that far beyond family, community, and nation. This is supreme existentialism. Wheeling galaxies, endless expanses of lifeless space, dark matter and multiverses, stars going nova and black holes yawning into presumed oblivion, and while the insects of mankind writhe, suffer, devour, and breed on this little speck of warm rock blessed with oxygen and water, wobbling around a sun. Accept death with peace, and thrive with life. The truly ironic and humorous thing is that in the "Western" world, death is ever-present. Any TV show, film, and book deals with it on some level, fine art often tackles it directly and my beloved metal music also delves deep into the subject matter explicitly, and yet the mostly insular societies of the "West" cower with chronophobia, the fear of dying, ignorant of deep time, narcissistic and idolatrous, never mind the usurpation of Memorial Day by neoliberal capitalism. Look at the last month+ of "worshipping" the man formally known as some goofy symbol, formally known as "Prince," nearly deified after death because he sang pop songs. Will the more magnanimous persona of Muhammad Ali unseat Prince from the populist spotlight of the media-driven sheeple? Time will tell; history will record.

From zombie and vampire shows to the ephemeral news-cycle "tragedy" of the moment, death is forever ever-present, danced around, deflected onto others, personified by classism (how many people perished while idiots pondered Prince), feared but never really embraced, played with by power (i.e., the unceremonious disposal of Osama bin Laden, the "heroic" fratricidal death of Pat Tillman), etc., etc. Laqueur covers all of this as it evolved in Europe (and the U.S.), and it is this evolution that is truly mesmerizing. "The disembodied names of the dead are thus the strangest of that strange category of noun, the proper name, because they are shadows of shadows: more insubstantial than ghosts" (p. 366). What does it mean to revere Prince, or Ghandi, or Shakespeare, or Muhammad, or Achilles? Is this post a form of memorial to my virtual identity as a reader and critic, or will it be lost in the endless detritus of online postings, or burned away when Goodreads becomes unprofitable to the mighty giant Amazon? We are all mulch for trees, ultimately, and as a follower of Diogenes, that sits just fine because in the end a person is a corpse who moves on to whatever awaits us on the other side of life.

For me, a deeper evolutionary excavation is even more profound, such as archeologists and cultural anthropologists currently mired in debate about the origins of early humankind's conscious practice of "burial," as recent finds in South Africa allude to with greater poignancy. When did we, as socially grouped, tool-using monkey-people (some 70 million years ago) decide we didn't like seeing our fallen brethren being ripped apart by other predators and carrion-eaters, and how did such belief systems grow into a multi-billion-dollar funerary industry fueled by spiritual spectacle? When did the belief of fallen-soldiers-as-fodder transform into fallen-soldiers-as-public-and-political-capital? I believe the dead body is a mirror to mortality, and a gateway to the cataclysmic Unknown that has ensorcelled conscious humanoids since the spark of awakening ignited the imagination, grunting and pointing to the moving pinpricks of starlight scintillating in the night sky.

Death finds us all; it is an unglamorous, typically painful (unless one is blessed with sedatives), and an incredibly lonely experience, and you will one day experience it fully. To embrace the philosophy and spirituality of death is to live life more fully, more purposefully, more cognizant that each day counts for something much greater than ourselves. Raise your children well, help strangers in need, support those dealing with strife, empathize with those of different cultures and creeds, and protect the planet for the ecosystems of future generations that inevitably inherit our greed-driven, myopic disasters-in-the-making.

As Nabokov wrote,

"Our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness."

And,

As Horace exclaimed long ago,
"No dirges for my fancied death;
No weak lament, no mournful stave;
All clamorous grief were waste of breath,
And vain the tribute of a grave."

When my body hits the cold floor for the final time, the Neptune Society will escort my ashes to the sea, and into oblivion I go peacefully, a shadow of a shadow cut away by the sun.



***
Extra resources:

https://aeon.co/essays/does-evolution...

http://www.scientificamerican.com/art...

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AbXXMgi...

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YLYb1Vd...

[LeeAnn Heringer · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's a huge book that begins with the idea that humans passed an important milestone for civilization when we begin to treat our dead compassionately, goes on to cover the history of the churchyard burial, the history of the cemetery, the history of cremation, and then circles back around to the modern "right-to-die". There's so much here to chew on and think deeply. Big book, big scope, interesting ideas.

If I had a complaint it would be that the writing is not as crisp as you could hope, the author circles an idea, taking a while to get to his point and making sure that he gives you several examples of what he's talking about. The author really chases his subject to ground. It's also true that the author, being British, is mostly interested in the British history of the dead. I think there's some interesting cross-cultural references that are missing by not expanding the scope of the history a little -- but as the author says (using a story from antiquity) each culture feels like they have the only logical, proper customs and everyone else are barbarians. It's a little like being trapped in a house on a rainy night with an old person who's warmed up to his subject and is determined to tell you everything he knows.

It was well worth the read, but settle in because it's going to take a while to get through it.

[Blair Hodges · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating if occasionally meandering history of the kind of cultural work dead human bodies do. That is, the author asks: what does the way we treat dead bodies tell us about our values, hopes, fears, desires, priorities, etc.?

He first traces the shift in burial practices from the churchyard to the more pluralist cemetery, then discusses what we do with the names of the dead, especially in connection with the dead of war, and he concludes with the modern rise of cremation and its place in culture since the nineteenth century.

I thoroughly enjoyed it, even though it was a real slow read. (As an aside, keep in mind it focuses almost entirely on Britain. I was also surprised he didn't speak at all to the culture of embalming.)

[Sally · Rating 5 out of 5]

Heavy. Literally so heavy I had to kind of rest it on something. Also heavy because very, very dense but interesting and borderline academic reading.

[GWC · Rating 3 out of 5]

Occasionally interesting but also quite a slog. The book repeatedly tries to convince us of the profundity of death and the dead, which seems sorta obvious, and so it often comes across as pretentious repetition. The scope does not live up to the claim that the book "examines why humanity has universally rejected Diogenes’s argument"; this is almost entirely about England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with an occasional nod to the French Revolution or the Pope. Some good historical bits (about England), but overall Drew Gilpin Faust's "The Republic of Suffering" is far superior and equally universal on the topic of the dead.

[Jerrod · Rating 3 out of 5]

This tome leaves no (tomb)stone unturned when it comes to burial practices in western Europe (especially Britain). This was very much a book to skim until you find the parts that interest you (much more of a reference book than most other academic books). I did enjoy it for the most part. There is more economics (in the broad sense) than I expected, especially when it comes to the Church of England's near monopoly on burials. Here are a few things I hope to remember from it:

- differential pricing for burying in different types of coffins (lead coffins last longer than wood ones)
- clashes with Church of England clergy about who can be buried and what kinds of services would be performed led to quite a bit of animosity towards the clergy, leading to the eventual decline in the authority of the church over who gets buried and leading to the rise in cemeteries
- regular scraping/leveling of churchyards to accommodate new decedents (i.e. residency in churchyards was not permanent)
- increase in naming and headstones after late 18th century
- one of the justifications for cremation in the late 19th century: people can contribute from beyond the grave to the national income; ash is worth 42 pounds sterling per ton

I was a little disappointed when I read in the introduction that the author would not be including much about burial practices outside western Europe, and I was more disappointed when I finished and the extent of the omission was revealed. If this were billed as just a book about burial practices in western Europe, then that would have been fine, but the author makes the grand claim that the dead interact with society to "make" culture (i.e., how we interact with the dead forms our culture as much as culture defines how we interact with the dead). I don't quite buy the author's theory, but if you are going to make grand claims, you'll need more than a thin slice of history from half of a continent to provide grounds for making those claims.

And in pursuit of evidence for the author's theory, I don't think he gave enough space to the effects of the economic changes and increasing urbanization would have on funerary practices.

Thus far, Death, Dissection, and the Destitute has a more detailed (and more satisfying account) of the market for cadavers in late 1700s and early 1800s England (with a dose of information on funerary practices and people's attitudes toward the dead).

[K. · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Work of the Dead is a particularly interesting (and yes, morbid) read. This is because of the many aspects that are brought in order to examine the cultural history in how society has treated the remains of the departed. It primarily focuses on the 18th century forwards, especially in Europe.

There were a few interesting historical gems, particularly with the right to burial. There would be bodies that would be refused this right due to politics and religious differences -- one would be refused to the fact they weren't "regularly baptized", but the reason was primarily because the family were known opponents of that Church. Another would be incorrect in death causes: a man had died due to a sabre wound to the head yet classified as "death due to natural causes".

More so, as Laqueur argues: "The history of the work of the dead is a history of how they dwell in us -- individually and communally. It is a history of how we imagine them to be, how they give meaning to our lives, how they structure public spaces, politics, and time."

[Jason · Rating 3 out of 5]

Useful, not so much for the author's interpretations, but simply for the sheer amount of information

[M Christopher · Rating 2 out of 5]

This could have been a really interesting 250-page book. Instead, it's 570 pages of prolix, repetitive, pedantic self-indulgence. Are there no good editors in the book business any more?

[Siegfried · Rating 5 out of 5]

---Notes---

Notes from 20230325

Chapter 5. "'when the road diverges,' Jupiter tells him, 'take the road to Elysium, the haven of the pure . . . rinse thyself with fresh pure water, for this land is Holy.'"

These verses not exist Book 6 of the Aeneid, and it's Sybil that mentions "splitting the road in two". The only source I found online is a 10-grade English assignment, written as a letter from Jupiter's perspective to Aeneas: https://www.scribd.com/document/15789...

Relevant verses in the Aeneid (Kline's translation):

"This is the place where the path splits itself in two:
there on the right is our road to Elysium, that runs beneath
the walls of mighty Dis: but the left works punishment
on the wicked, and sends them on to godless Tartarus.’"

---
Notes from 20230306
p. 215. "... the ideal of a natural death—quiet, unanguished, and unmarked, like a tree’s, or in an expected and ordinary part of life"

"..it became ever more important to bridge the chasm of death not just with the hope for a reunion in the next life but with a venue for a continuing relationship in this one."

(suddenly crying

---
Notes from 20201010

p432. "Naming here is an act of redeeming the private past, returning "to the requesting families the remains of their murdereed, formerly 'disappeared' loved ones," as well as an act of public memory, a step in the "reconstruction of the usually denied recent history" and an act of faith in the moral imagination."

p445. "The claims of the names of the dead are parallel to the claims of the names of the living: a claim to a life equal to other lives, a claim to a life story with a meaningful denouement, a claim to a part in the making of history and the social order at different levels."

p. 447-448. "'My own dear Mother... We were marooned on a frozen desert... There is not a sign of life on the horizon and a thousand signs of death. Not a blade of grass, not an insect... but extra for me is the universal pervasion of uglinees. Hideous landscapes... everything unnatural, broken, blasted; the distortion of the dead, whose un-buriable bodies sit outside dug-outs all day, all night, the most execrable sights on earth. In poetry we call them the most glorious. But to sit with them all day, all night.. and a week later to come back and find them sitting there, in a motionless group, THAT is what saps the soldierly spirit. - WILFRED OWEN, Letters..., SUNDAY, 4 FEBRUARY 1917'
The English poet Wilfred Owen writes in this letter to his mother not only about the battlefield of Flanders -the cold that left him numb and some of his companions dead; the thirst he suffered because Sterno cans were not hot enough to melt enough snow to drink; the near madness from the bursting of high explosives; "the universal pervasion of ugliness" - but also about the most execrable sight on earth: the unburiable dead.. He indulges in the grotesque irony that would inform so powerfully the memory of the Great War: "in poetry we call them the most glorious." But he gives voice also to the immemorial abjection of the dead and to the expectation that in a normal world they will, they can, they should be buried properly instead of remaining in their distorted forms among the living. He writes too in the knowledge that these dead have an audience: his mother and other mothers. The dead of the Great War died and were unburiable by the hundreds of thousands on the battlefront, but they subsisted also within the narrative embrace of a wider world."

Read this five times in a row. I'm fucking obsessed with how Laqueur writes. The epigraph is precise, and the commentary is precise as well. This is exactly how textual commentary should be written!

Afterword, pp. 550. "...I would be writing a history marked by rupture: a rupture not in the history of care of the dead body but in the experience of dying. We are entering a new age - not of being dead but of becoming dead... For us, dying has spiraled out of the orbit of nature and has also left its history behind; engineering is at the bedside, as are lawyers and social workers and many others.
...Perhalps the strangest sign of rupture is the discovery and widespread acceptance of a so-called right to die. We can only imagine what this claim would have sounded like to our ancestors if they had taken it for what it seems to demand: the right to be cursed by mortality? the right to follow the course of nature, as if one needed to demand that the tides ebb and that winter comes as it does? Understood in this perhaps too literal way, it has no negative correlative: no "freedom from" is possible. Unlike the right to free speech or assembly or privacy that authorities can deny, there is no way on earth to deny the right to die.
...
Finally, in 1990, the right to die was enshrined in the U.S. Supreme Court decision in the Cruzan case... The freedom to die, so long unquestioned and unquestionable, had become the law.
...Thre are three reasons why all this litigation and legistlation was necessary - why it is so hard to die today...
A second and more fundamental reason undergirds the first: the rise of technologies and treatments that allow life to be prolonged and death to be kept at bay longer than what would have been, in another age, the moments of its final triumpth. For the first time in human history, there is always something that can be done to gain extra hours, days, or even months of life... The right to die, and to have a death with dignity, arises because we now have the means to slow dying in circumstances that are far from dignified... In the twenty-first century, we press not just the dead but also the dying into cultural serrvice of the living. At stake in our conflicting beliefs about proper and dignified care of the bodies of the dying is unresolved ambivalence about the power of our technology and the extent of our alienation from nature.
... We have no cultrual history to guide us when health and well-being fade and dying becomes a branch of bioengineering."

Dreamed of grandma again last night after reading this. In my dream she had terminal cancer but was still capable of taking care of herself and even cooked for everyone. Perhaps the most unacceptable thing about her death to me was the way she died, without dignity, sustained by chemicals and machines. As Laqueur puts it, in modern society, this stripped-of-dignity death has become a paradigm, euphemistically termed as "fighting."

p. 555 "This level of individual decision making fits all too well into the imaginative realm of war that so often defines the end of life today: dying is losing a battle, a sad but seemingly contingent surrender , as if there were a choice. At issues seems to be the bravery and daring of patient and doctor: to die or not to die - a terrible personal choice whether to stay at one's post as long as possible at whatever cost. It seems almost an act of cowardice to give up. .. dying has become something new when one seems to have so many choices: another stem cell transplant? more chemotherapy? a dangerous operation that may buy weeks or months of life? or surrender?"

p.xiii, "More than a decade after we mixed my father’s ashes with the clay soil of Virginia, I was invited to lecture in Germany. My wife suggested that I take some of his ashes with me and mix them with those of his father, my grandfather, in Hamburg. I replied that, as she well knew, I had no ashes; they were by now leached away by the snows of winter and rains of summer. A body yields little more than a milk carton in volume of ash; nothing of him could possibly be left. After some discussion, I finally decided to take a small bag of dirt in which there might have been a homeopathically small number of inorganic molecules that had once been in my father and to mix these with the soil of his father’s grave. This gesture of repatriation would have been regarded by my father as an act of rank superstition. And so, I suppose, it was. If there were any molecules that had been part of my father’s body in the bag of dirt, they were indistinguishable from the soil amendments one adds to one’s garden: mostly calcium phosphate and calcium carbonate, some sodium and potassium salts, trace elements of this and that. But it did seem right that some of him—however attenuated and basely material—should be back where he had once felt both comfortable and troubled; and it did make me understand that he was dead. And it united him with the father he had lost when he was seventeen, with whom he had been exceptionally close. It seemed a gesture that mirrored my insistence on giving lectures in German in Germany, even to an audience like that at the Kennedy Institute for North American Studies in Berlin, where everyone’s academic English is better than my academic German. Like the return of dirt pretending to be ashes pretending to be a body pretending to bear some relationship to a person I had loved, there is little reason has to say about all this. Such is the work of culture."

ix, "When I think of a small arena that I know well - the attitudes of my parents toward death - I can report the following: my father went from cold, clinical detachment and annoyance at me for not understanding the pathophysiology of his hypernephroma to a sad and increasingly mute resignation toward his miserable impending end from various metastatic cancers. Those in the lung finally killed him through a massive hemorrhage. My mother faced death with absolute and unshakeable equanimity although she had, as far as I or anyone could tell, no views of an afterlife or indeed any views of the subject of death except that it was a relief from the diminishment of old age. Dying to her seemed like being absorbed into the Brahms "Requiem" or Beethoven "Missa Solemnis" or a Heine poem. As for me, I scarcely reacted to my father's death for six months; it took me years to absorb it. To this day, I have no attitude toward it. He does appear relatively often as a young man in my dreams. I miss him as perhaps the most important audience for my life. And I stand before my mothers' death with awe, admiration, and disbelief. I imagine her spirit hovers over a lake in Virginia where she swam every summer for years. Given this muddle - my own inability to articulate the attitudes toward death of people I knew and know intimately - it seemed futile to explore the subject systematically in those whom I would know considerably less well in the distant past. I gave up on a history of death as a history project of the inner life."

p.560, n.3. :When he developed dropsy, he covered himself with dung in the hopes that its heat would dry him out. Then he died, either because the treatment failed or because he couldn’t get the dung off and dogs tore him apart.:

Heraclitus was a punk

[Andrew Davis · Rating 4 out of 5]

A cultural history of dead and their names. At times fascinating, but often hard going too. As some earlier reviewers noted, it could be much more readable if edited to remove all the repetitions and many blind alleys the autor indulges in getting into. Worth reading if you interested about this cultural phenomenon and its changes over the ages.

{Notes:}
Marx wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on Epicurus, who offers the most influential argument for death as a complete and permanent annihilation. (At page 20).

In his introduction Laqueur mentions a case about Karl Marx's grave at Highgate. It is surrounded by a number of socialist/communist thinkers and activists. As they all were strict materialists, it is strange that they considered it important to be buried close to their leader. Laqueur interprets this as the result of their inability to recognise that what has befallen others will befall us - complete oblivion. (At page 21).

Socrates, just before he takes the poison, he tries to make his student Crito understand that he would not be "laying out, or carrying out or burying Socrates", because Socrates would no longer be there (At page36).

Traditionally, the graves were placed in east-west axis with deceased facing south. It was believed that on the Judgement Day, Christ will come from Jerusalem and by facing south the resurrected dead will be able to welcome his coming.

Up till 19th century there were no public cemeteries and people were buried in or around their local churches. Due to space restrictions new burials were at the sites that already had been used before. The local priest and community were in charge of costs and allocations.

Laqueur relates a story of Joseph Haydn's body after it had been buried in Vienna in 1809. His employer, Prine Esterhazy, wanted Haydn buried in his estate in Eisenstadt. He ordered his exhumation and it was found that Haydn's head was missing. The accountant of the Prince - Karl Rosenbaum and Johann Peter, the governor of the local prison were suspected. The Prince offered to pay for the head. The pair gave him two. The first one was rejected as belonged to a young man. The second was accepted. When Rosenbaum died he left the Haydn's head to Peter. When he died the head was returned to the Society of the Friends of Music. In 1932 the Society agreed to return the head, but the Vienna city fathers refused it. Finally, in 1954 the Haydn's body was made whole.

Demographers calculate that between 82 and 108 billion people have been born since beginning of humankind. The LDS estimates that 26 billion people were born between 1500 and 2010, eight billion documented. They indexed 3.3 billion names.

[Richard Ascough · Rating 4 out of 5]

Perhaps overly dense in tracing the history of the cultural interactions of the living with the dead, Laqueur is admittedly still Euro-focused. The result is a compelling argument about how the living treat the dead - burial, cremation, memorial, desecration, and so on - and how such treatments tell us about ourselves and our histories. The most recent, and major cultural shift, he argues, was not from the sacred to the profane body, but in how the dead came to work in the interests of historically defined communities in the Enlightenment period (e.g., the French Revolution or the rise of the industrial class in England) rather than in the interests of divinely defined communities of previous times (from time of the ancient Greeks and Romans through the control of the dead in churchyards).

[Commit Purple Prose · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a slow book. The author did a huge amount of research and seems determined to make the reader well aware of how much research he did.

It meanders from topic to topic and time to time. There is little outside of the British Empire mentioned by page 361 revealing the author's British bias. He is also determined to show off his vocabulary with fancy words when simpler ones would make this book far more accessible such as necronominalism (spellcheck hates that one) but it means "naming the dead." What is wrong with using that phrase? If one must use the word to prove something, then define it in the text. There should be footnotes for these terms. Laqueur is also fond of writing "More about that in chapter..." "I will explore that more in chapter..." There are far too many first person refers in a book of this style. I'm reading this for a grad class, if I turn in a paper that says "I" points will come off.

I'm not saying it is not interesting, but if it wasn't required for a class I would not be reading this book. It needs major editing to make it readable.

[Stu Napier · Rating 4 out of 5]

An impressive and well researched work. Although advertised as a cultural history of the dead, this book primarily explores European Christian tradition. Whilst the information given is to a high level of detail, there is perhaps too much in places - excessive and niche details that the work wouldn't suffer to omit. Having 2x 100+ page chapters in a row is also a bit brutal, so this could have done with a strong-willed editor to break down and trim to essentials. Still worth a read to those interested in the anthropology of death and burial.

[Juliana Gray · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is very long and very dense, but definitely worthwhile. It took me about a year to read in two- or three-page bites, slowly digesting the historical and cultural information that the author so clearly explains and contextualizes. Recommended for anyone who loves history, though literature fans may want to browse a copy just for the thorough elucidation of Gray's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard."

[VonLeonhardt · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is phenomenal, but very dense to read. It also, especially towards the beginning, repeats a bit.

I think this text is worth reading for anyone interested, but you will want to pace yourself and possibly take notes.

[Gail Johnson, Ph.D · Rating 5 out of 5]

A good read for mortuary scientists enthuses such as myself. As the title suggests the author's 20 year study discusses how and why some people were buried the way they were buried. It also covers why we have Health Departments today and why some cemeteries look like out door museums.

[T. Rhodes · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is so amazing I purchased it. Dense and satisfactory.

[Nicole · Rating 5 out of 5]

A little about a lot and has great flow for the narrative.

[Sarah O'Brien · Rating 2 out of 5]

Quit - subject matter is interesting and there are interesting bits, but the author is being way too dense.

[Njie Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hi I really need a copy of this book but don't have up to that amount to buy but I love the book. Am currently writing my own book on Sexual Daviants which will be published next year.

[Morgan · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good analysis of how the dead influence culture, alongside how the perceptions of the dead and burial have changed. Felt as though some points were dragged.

[Benji · Rating 3 out of 5]

In the twenty-first century, we press not just the dead but also the dying into cultural service of the living. At stake in our conflicting beliefs about proper and dignified care of the bodies of the dying is unresolved ambivalence about the power of our technology and the extent of our alienation from nature.