Catalog Search Results
Author
Pub. Date
2022.
Physical Desc
vii, 277 pages ; 24 cm
Description
"A fascinating and oft-surprising exploration of the history and meaning of funeral rituals"--
"Ceremonies for honoring the departed are crucial parts of our lives, but few people know where our traditional practices come from -- and what they reveal about our history, culture, and beliefs about death. In Last Rites, author Todd Harra takes you on a fascinating exploration of American customs around death, burial, and remembrance" -- From book jacket....
4) The American resting place: four hundred years of history through our cemeteries and burial grounds
Author
Pub. Date
2008
Physical Desc
xv, 336 p., [64] of plates : ill. ; 24 cm.
Author
Pub. Date
[2019]
Physical Desc
297 pages ; 24 cm
Description
"From the internationally best-selling author of Fatherland and the Cicero Trilogy--a chilling and dark new thriller unlike anything Robert Harris has done before. 1468. A young priest, Christopher Fairfax, arrives in a remote Exmoor village to conduct the funeral of his predecessor. The land around is strewn with ancient artifacts--coins, fragments of glass, human bones--which the old parson used to collect. Did his obsession with the past lead to...
Author
Pub. Date
2018.
Physical Desc
88 pages : color illustrations ; 24 cm.
Description
"Why do we die? Why can't we live forever? What happens to us after death? Moving between science and culture, After Life: Ways We Think About Death takes a straightforward look at these and other questions long taboo in our society. By showing the fascinating, diverse ways in which we understand death, both today and throughout our history, the book also shines a light on what it is to be human. Each chapter includes a brief telling of a death legend,...
7) The promise
Author
Pub. Date
[2021]
Physical Desc
269 pages ; 22 cm
Description
A modern saga that could only have come from South Africa, written in gorgeous prose by the Booker Prize-shortlisted author Damon Galgut. Haunted by an unmet promise, the Swart family loses touch after the death of their matriarch. Adrift, the lives of the three siblings move separately through the uncharted waters of South Africa; Anton, the golden boy who bitterly resents his life's unfulfilled promises; Astrid, whose beauty is her power; and the...
Author
Pub. Date
c2010
Physical Desc
xx, 244 p., [8] p. of plates : ill., map ; 25 cm.
Description
"In April 1945, the funeral train carrying the body of Franklin D. Roosevelt embarked on a three-day, thousand-mile odyssey through nine states before reaching the president's home where he was buried. It passed with darkened windows; few gave thought to what might be happening aboard. A closer look inside the train, however, would reveal a Soviet spy about to leak a state secret, a newly widowed Eleanor Roosevelt, who just found out that her husband's...
Author
Pub. Date
2018.
Physical Desc
xiii, 257 pages : illustrations ; 21 cm
Description
Fascinated by our pervasive fear of dead bodies, mortician Caitlin Doughty set out to discover how other cultures care for the dead. In rural Indonesia, she watches a man clean and dress his grandfather's mummified body, which has resided in the family home for two years. In La Paz, she meets Bolivian natitas (cigarette-smoking, wish-granting human skulls), and in Tokyo she encounters the Japanese kotsuage ceremony, in which relatives use chopsticks...
Author
Pub. Date
[2019]
Physical Desc
303 pages : map ; 22 cm.
Description
"'This is how we carried out of Africa the poor broken body of Bwana Daudi, the Doctor, David Livingstone, so that he could be borne across the sea and buried in his own land.' So begins Petina Gappah's powerful novel of exploration and adventure in nineteenth-century Africa--the captivating story of the loyal men and women who carried explorer and missionary Dr. Livingstone's body, his papers and maps, fifteen hundred miles across the continent of...
Author
Pub. Date
[2015]
Physical Desc
xii, 216 pages ; 25 cm
Description
"An intimate voyage into Japanese culture and spirituality, culminating in one of Japan's most sacred places. Marie Mutsuki Mockett's family owns a Buddhist temple 25 miles from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. In March 2011, after the earthquake and tsunami, radiation levels prohibited the burial of her Japanese grandfather's bones. At the same time, Mockett grieved for her American father, who had died unexpectedly. As Japan mourned thousands...
12) The Queen
Pub. Date
c2005, [2007]
Physical Desc
1 videodisc (103 min.) : sd., col. ; 4 3/4 in.
Description
The Queen begins with a familiar epigraph "Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown" - Henry IV, Part II. The action of the film takes place during the week following the death, on August 31, 1997 of Diana, Princess of Wales. One of its accomplishments, courtesy of adroit use of newsreel and other contemporary footage, is to remind viewers of the deep sadness that surrounded that event. It is also about the divergent and potentially ruinous ways...
Author
Pub. Date
2022.
Physical Desc
268 pages ; 25 cm
Description
"A deeply compelling exploration of the death industry and the people--morticians, detectives, crime scene cleaners, embalmers, executioners--who work in it and what led them there. We are surrounded by death. It is in our news, our nursery rhymes, our true-crime podcasts. Yet from a young age, we are told that death is something to be feared. How are we supposed to know what we're so afraid of, when we are never given the chance to look? Fueled by...
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