Is the Cemetery Dead? - David Charles Sloane

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Is the Cemetery Dead?

By: David Charles Sloane

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Hardcover | 25 April 2018 | Edition Number 1

At a Glance

Hardcover
288 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
23 x 15 x 3

Hardcover

RRP $49.95

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In modern society, we have professionalized our care for the dying and deceased in hospitals and hospices, churches and funeral homes, cemeteries and mausoleums to aid dazed and disoriented mourners. But these formal institutions can be alienating and cold, leaving people craving a more humane mourning and burial process. The burial treatment itself has come to be seen as wasteful and harmful—marked by chemicals, plush caskets, and manicured greens. Today’s bereaved are therefore increasingly turning away from the old ways of death and searching for a more personalized, environmentally responsible, and ethical means of grief.

Is the Cemetery Dead? gets to the heart of the tragedy of death, chronicling how Americans are inventing new or adapting old traditions, burial places, and memorials. In illustrative prose, David Charles Sloane shows how people are taking control of their grief by bringing their relatives home to die, interring them in natural burial grounds, mourning them online, or memorializing them streetside with a shrine, ghost bike, or RIP mural. Today’s mourners are increasingly breaking free of conventions to better embrace the person they want to remember. As Sloane shows, these changes threaten the future of the cemetery, causing cemeteries to seek to become more responsive institutions.

A trained historian, Sloane is also descendent from multiple generations of cemetery managers and he grew up in Syracuse’s Oakwood Cemetery. Enriched by these experiences, as well as his personal struggles with overwhelming grief, Sloane presents a remarkable and accessible tour of our new American way of death.

Industry Reviews

"David Charles Sloane's new book Is the Cemetery Dead? examines our evolving mourning rituals, specifically in relationship to cemeteries. . . .The book starts with Sloane's deeply personal reflection on the death of his wife and his struggle to come to terms and choose a "resting place" (a phrase that itself belies our discomfort with the site's function). The task is both enriched and complicated by the fact that Sloane hails from a long line of cemetery superintendents and sextons. His research is supplemented by his experience growing up within the walls of the cemetery his father managed. While he has fond memories of cemeteries, he also acknowledges that they face acute problems. . . .[Sloane] offers a levelheaded report on the death care industry. This coverage is valuable because the spatial projects piloted in cemeteries have a way of popping back up in the world of the living."-- "Los Angeles Review of Books"

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