Books - The Funeral Ritual:
History, Importance & Customs
by Doug Manning (Author) "I have watched the movement away from the traditional funeral with a deepening sense of sorrow and foreboding..." (more)
Rest in Peace: A Cultural History of Death and the Funeral Home in Twentieth-Century America (Hardcover)
by Gary Laderman (Author) "By the start of the twentieth century, the relationship between the living and the dead in America had begun to change dramatically..." (more)
In 1963, Jessica Mitford's The American Way of Death shocked the nation and provoked scandal throughout the funeral industry. Mitford portrayed undertakers as exploitative businessmen eager to turn a profit off of a poor man's grief. Her book climbed the bestseller list and put the growing and profitable funeral industry on the defensive. Forty years later, Laderman comes to the industry's defense with this thoughtful book. His case is cautious and honest. He presents the industry's history from its inception during the Civil War period up to the present. The author explores American attitudes toward death through various lenses, including cultural, religious and psychological history, which demonstrate a pervasive fascination with death and a desire to share an intimate moment with the dead as a part of the grieving process. Cultural examples of this include the wave of public grief at the sudden death of movie icon Rudolph Valentino and Thornton Wilder's Pulitzer-winning play Our Town. In the last chapter, Laderman discusses current and future challenges facing the industry-such as a desire for cremation and "the rise of death-care giants"-and the industry's successful attempt to deal with them. Laderman, a professor of American religious history and culture at Emory University, provides convincing evidence that the industry is a necessary and compassionate force in American life. While critics like Mitford paint a picture of greed, this account offers a more nuanced image: an industry that provides a "meaningful and material order out of the chaos of death." Illus. not seen by PW.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
by Lisa Rogak (Author)
Whether it’s because food helps survivors cope with loss or because people want to send their dead off with some nourishment for their journey or because "there’s no better way to prove you’re alive... than by eating," the practice of feasting after a funeral has become commonplace in most cultures. In this volume, Rogak, who sells sympathy cards for pet owners and has written over 25 books, describes the rituals of more than 100 ethnic, cultural and religious groups. Arranging her odd collection alphabetically by culture—from "African American" to "Zoroastrianism"—Rogak gives a one-page explanation and a recipe for each culture. Some of the dishes are common and not necessarily associated with death, such as Italian Antipasto, while others sound quite morbid, like Tibetan Sweet People Cookies (which call for chocolate-covered gummy people). Though hardly scholarly, this slim volume is amusingly informative.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
by Lisa Takeuchi Cullen
This intriguing survey of America's rapidly mutating funeral customs probes the one force mightier than death: consumerism. Journalist Cullen explores the innumerable ways in which funerals are being personalized, publicized, economized, commercialized, trivialized and, perhaps, humanized. Among the many offbeat memorials she unearths are funerals with Hawaiian, tango or Harley-Davidson themes, as well as beer-themed caskets, eco-friendly funerals, "human diamonds" manufactured from a loved one's ashes, and a Colorado town that celebrates a do-it-yourself cryonics pioneer with its Frozen Dead Guy Days Festival, now a major tourist attraction. In the middle of it all, she finds, is an uneasy funeral industry, squeezed at the bottom by cheap Chinese caskets and the vogue for no-frills cremation and challenged at the top by finicky boomer customers demanding more elaborate and symbol-laden rites (one poignant graveside dove-release attracted a passing hawk, with off-message results.) Cullen isn't much given to muckraking or dark pensées; "Death is a big, huge bummer" is as morbid as she gets. Her set-piece retrospectives on the guests of honor at unusual send-offs sometimes seem dully eulogistic. But for the most part her vivid reportage and wryly sympathetic tone feel anything but embalmed.
by Mark Harris
Harris's case for an eco-friendly burial is also an argument for a graceful and productive afterlife. Avoiding embalming keeps funeral waste out of our sewers, while burial in a shroud or cardboard coffin saves trees; these approaches can also bring the living back in touch with the cycle of life, he argues. Following in the footsteps of Jessica Mitford (author of The American Way of Death), Harris discusses the ways in which Americans have shifted care of the dead out of the hands and homes of friends and family as he tours various burial options, from the most environmentally intrusive to the least. His graphic description of an embalming offers a sharp contrast to a burial in a biodegradable coffin in a nature reserve, where the decaying body will help restore the environment. Embalming is also expensive ($12,376) compared to burial in an artificial reef (between $995 and $4,995 after the $1,800 cremation). Acknowledging that burial requires a series of difficult decisions in the midst of devastating emotions, this practical, powerful and affirming book succeeds as a survey of burial methods, a collection of true stories and a resource guide..
by Thomas Lynch
"...I had come to know that the undertaking that my father did had less to do with what was done to the dead and more to do with what the living did about the fact of life that people died," Thomas Lynch muses in his preface to The Undertaking. The same could be said for Lynch's book: ostensibly about death and its attendant rituals, The Undertaking is in the end about life. In each case, he writes, it is the one that gives meaning to the other. A funeral director in Milford, Michigan, Lynch is that strangest of hyphenates, a poet-undertaker, but according to Lynch, all poets share his occupation, "looking for meaning and voices in life and love and death." Looking for meaning takes him to all sorts of unexpected places, both real and imagined. He embalms the body of his own father, celebrates the rebuilt bridge to his town's old cemetery, takes issue with the Jessica Mitfords of this world, and envisages a "golfatorium," a combination golf course and cemetery that could restore joy to the last rites. In "Crapper," Lynch even contemplates the subtleties of the modern flush toilet and its relationship to the messy business of dying: "Just about the time we were bringing the making of water and the movement of bowels into the house, we were pushing the birthing and marriage and sickness and dying out." Death and fatherhood, death and friendship, death and faith and love and poetry--these are the concerns that power Lynch's undertaking. Throughout, Lynch pleads the case for our dead--who are, after all, still living through us--with an eloquence marked by equal parts whimsy, wit, and compassion. In the last essay, "Tract," he envisions almost wistfully the funeral he'd choose for himself, and then relinquishes that, too. Funerals, after all, are for the living. The dead, he reminds us, don't care.
The American Way of Death Revisited (Paperback)
by Jessica Mitford
At the time of her death in 1996, Mitford had nearly completed this revision of her 1963 bestseller, a scathing critique of the U.S. funeral industry. Extensively revised, with subsequent additions by her husband, lawyer Robert Treuhaft, Lisa Carlson, an activist in the funeral-reform movement, and research assistant Karen Leonard, Mitford's mordant look at the excesses of the high-pressure salesmanship and lapses of taste of the "death-care industry" still rings true, and the book will evoke readers' ire. Mitford identifies disturbing new trends: cremation, once a low-cost option, has become increasingly expensive as mortuaries pressure the bereaved to buy a "traditional" funeral with all the accoutrements. Monopolistic companies have moved into the field and now account for 20% of the nation's funerals. Furthermore, she charges, the Federal Trade Commission's lax enforcement of its 1984 rule banning morticians' deceptive practices has contributed to an upward spiral of prices and profits. Other developments of the 1990s perceptively analyzed here include the refusal of many funeral directors to embalm AIDS victims and the growing popularity of low-cost funeral and memorial service organizations, which are listed in an appendix.
Western Attitudes toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present (The Johns Hopkins Symposia in Comparative History) (Paperback)
by Philippe Ariès (Author), Patricia Ranum (Translator)
"Ariès traces Western man's attitudes toward mortality from the early medieval conception of death as the familiar collective destiny of the human race to the modern tendency, so pronounced in industrial societies, to hide death as if it were an embarrassing family secret." -- Newsweek
by Kenneth Kramer
Examines how each of the major religions looks at death by including stories, teachings and rituals that present a comparative religious meaning of death and afterlife. Written in textbook style with journal exercises at the end of each chapter.
The History of Death: Burial Customs and Funeral Rites, from the Ancient World to Modern Times (Paperback)
by Michael Kerrigan
Death may be universal, but just as every culture has found ways of living life differently, each has also found different and sometimes extraordinary ways to deal with dying and the effects that it has on the people left behind. This wide-ranging book examines the compelling subject of death and burial in varied cultures, societies, and ages. It considers the rituals surrounding death, from the drama of medieval French royal funerals to the live burials of the Dinka in the Sudan, and from facing death, with the 5,000 strong terra-cotta army, as the first Chinese emperor Shihuangdi did in 260 B.C., to the elaborate mausolea of wealthy Victorians.
Covering all periods in history and religions, The History of Death also examines the differing approaches to funerals, whether solemn, celebratory, drunken or even sexually promiscuous. It illuminates the combination between the earthly and spiritual in furneral rites, the practices of human sacrifice and ritual killing, as well as the processes of grieving, burial, cremation, remembrance, and the differing concepts of life after death.
by Thomas Lynch
All poets who take their jobs seriously spend a good deal of their time pondering death. Few, though, have logged as many hours as Thomas Lynch, who for 25 years has been a funeral director in Milford, Michigan. As might be expected from a writer who performs "daily stations with the local lately dead," Lynch's second essay collection, Bodies in Motion and at Rest: On Metaphor and Mortality, has a lot to say about both the current state of his industry (with its "Walmartized" funerals) and the attitude Americans have toward death, which is more or less to pretend it doesn't exist and to hope it never happens to us or anyone we know. Of course, this leads to our inability to properly understand life. And we become one of those stunned mumblers whom the author has spent a lifetime consoling and selling caskets to at Lynch & Sons.
by Jacqueline S. Thursby (Author)
Funeral Festivals in America suggests that there is an irony in the festivities surrounding death and that the American response to death often develops into an event celebrating the ties between family members and friends. Thursby cites rituals for loved ones separated at the time of death, the frivolities surrounding death, funeral foods and feasts, post-funeral rites and ongoing commemorations, and many other facets of the American way of dealing with death.
