American afterlife : encounters in the customs of mourning /
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 th...
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
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Athens :
University of Georgia Press,
[2014]
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| Summary: | 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:, including 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. |
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| Physical Description: | xiv, 216 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references. |
| ISBN: | 9780820346007 (hardcover : alk. paper) 0820346004 (hardcover : alk. paper) |