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Encounters in the Customs of Mourning
by Kate Sweeney
Someone dies. What happens next?
One family inters their matriarch's ashes on the floor of the ocean. Another holds a memorial weenie roast each year at a greenburial cemetery. An 1898 ad for embalming fluid promises, "You can make mummies with it!" while a leading contemporary burial vault is touted as impervious to the elements. A grieving mother, 150 years ago, might spend her days tending a garden at her daughter's grave. Today, she might tend the roadside memorial she erected at the spot her daughter was killed. One mother wears a locket containing her daughter's hair; the other, a necklace containing her ashes.
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: 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 deathobsessed 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.
"Sweeney writes with a deft touch and with empathy for mourners, whose stories she relays with clarity and care." - Publishers Weekly
"Written with the grim wit and appreciation of investigative reporter Mary Roach, the author delivers informative history on the murky business of death. A considerate exploration of mourning, just haunting enough to attract those with a penchant for macabre oddities." - Kirkus
"From cooling boards to cremationists, obituarists to embalmers, Kate Sweeney's American Afterlife holds a mirror up to human mortality and mortuary praxis and gives us a reading of the vital signs." - Thomas Lynch, author of The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade
"At a brisk pace, but with frequent stops to relish the magnificent oddities of the terrain, Kate Sweeney guides readers down the lanes and boulevards of the American way of death... dare I say it? - terrifically entertaining." - Peter Trachtenberg, author of Another Insane Devotion: On the Love of Cats and Persons
"American Afterlife is an insightful, warm, and lively tour of how we say goodbye. Kate Sweeney's quest for the 'why' behind mourning rituals has given us a book in the best tradition of narrative journalism." - Jessica Handler, author of Braving the Fire: A Guide to Writing about Grief and Loss
This information about American Afterlife was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Kate Sweeney is a producer for NPR affiliate WABE 90.1 FM in Atlanta, Georgia. She has won two Edward R. Murrow awards and two Associated Press awards for her work.
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