Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #69001 in Books
• Published on: 2008-05-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 352 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780618624270
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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From Publishers Weekly
To rescue the dead from oblivion, examine America's ethnic diversity and highlight shifts in cemetery mores over time, cultural historian Yalom (A History of the Breast) and her photographer son (Colonial Noir) traveled to more than 250 American cemeteries across the country. From the ancient Native American Etowah mounds in northern Georgia (abandoned around 1550, when the tribes were presumably destroyed by European diseases) to Rhode Island's Touro Jewish Cemetery, established in 1677 (it inspired a moving poem by Longfellow), Yalom examines the ways gender, class and culture affected how people were buried. New Orleans's cemeteries, for instance, show discrepancies between white and black residents: whites were buried in aboveground tombs, blacks in soggy earth that sometimes forced remains back up to the surface. Chicago's Waldheim holds Gypsies and anarchist Emma Goldman, while the moneyed aristocrats Marshall Field and Cyrus McCormick ended up in Graceland Cemetery. While rich, interesting nuggets abound, the mount of time and territory covered results in some shallow analysis. 80 b&w photos. (May 15)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post

Reviewed by John Berendt

Last fall, attendants watching the security monitors at Disneyland noticed a woman dumping a powdery substance from a boat going through the darkened "Pirates of the Caribbean" cavern. When the attendants confronted her, she told them it was only baby powder, but it later turned out to be the cremated remains of a human being. No one was much surprised. According to some reports, scattering ashes at Disneyland had already reached "epidemic proportions."

The epidemic, if that's what it is, probably is not limited to Disneyland. Cremation has become increasingly popular in America, especially in Western states, where more than 50 percent of the deceased are cremated. The ashes traditionally are sealed in an urn and then locked in an individual vault in the wall of a cemetery. If the furtive sprinkling of ashes in public places is truly becoming common, it would constitute a fourth stage in the evolution of burial places in America over the last 400 years.

This evolution, from the colonial era to the present, has so far produced three kinds of burial grounds. The earliest was the graveyard: a somber place, usually located in town, often next to a church, and typically marked with simple, tablet-shaped headstones inscribed, "Here lies the body of. . . ." Graveyards served as grim reminders to passersby that they, too, would die one day.

A second form of burial ground, originating with Boston's Mount Auburn Cemetery in 1831, was the rural or garden cemetery, usually on the outskirts of town in an idyllic landscape of rolling hills, woodlands, ponds and elaborate memorial statuary. Here the message was not the certainty of death but the promise of paradise.

Finally, the third type, which developed in reaction against the sentimentality and ostentation of many garden cemeteries, was the lawn cemetery. Uncluttered in the extreme, lawn cemeteries dispense with most statues and mausoleums in favor of discreet plaques set flush to the ground. Visitors are greeted by an uninterrupted parkland vista, more like a golf course than a garden, in which the notion of death is virtually erased. Forest Lawn in Glendale, Calif., is easily the best known, having been made famous by Evelyn Waugh's fiendish satire in The Loved One.

The changes in America's burial grounds over four centuries amount to what Marilyn Yalom calls "distancing the dead," by which she means the paring away of reminders that cemeteries have anything to do with death. An early manifestation of this trend, she notes in The American Resting Place, was the transition from skull-and-crossbones carvings to winged angels on 18th-century tombstones. This change happened at the same time that the Puritans' bleak fixation on death, decay and damnation was giving way to a more hopeful belief in the soul's everlasting life.

Yalom's captivating book begins as a historical monograph but becomes a travelogue of some of the 250 cemeteries she visited in the course of her research. She was accompanied by her son, photographer Reid S. Yalom, who took the evocative, black-and-white pictures that are presented in a 64-page frontispiece to the book.

One need not be a cemetery buff to be drawn in, for Marilyn Yalom approaches burial places with enthusiasm, as if she were an archeologist sifting for clues to America's cultural, social, ethical and political history. Evidence of increasing life expectancies, for example, can be seen by checking birth and death dates on gravestones -- and by taking note of the disappearance of such appalling burial features as the "baby pit" at St. Matthew Cemetery in Conshohocken, Penn.

Segregation by race, religion and ethnicity has been reflected in cemeteries up to the present day, some of it benign, some not. Jews could not be buried in Massachusetts before 1840; private cemeteries in California could refuse to accept blacks and Asians until 1959. The names of two African American cemeteries in Charleston, S.C., tell a tale of black-on-black prejudice. One is the Brown Fellowship Graveyard for Light-Skinned Blacks, consecrated in 1794, which barred membership and burial rights to anyone who did not have a light complexion and "blowing in the wind hair." The other, founded by a man who was rejected by Brown's fellowship in 1843, is Thomas Small's Graveyard for the Society of Blacks of Dark Complexion.

Gravestones also reveal the changing role of women in America. Yalom cites a study of colonial gravestones in the Boston area showing that more than 70 percent of the women were described only as "wife," "widow," "mother" or "daughter." Even more striking, the survey found marital references in the epitaphs of 2,000 women but only nine men. Four centuries later, a gravestone erected in Wilmington, N.C., proclaims the departed to be "An honest and forthright businesswoman."

Though the book is pleasingly full of anecdotes and information, one omission worth mentioning is that rural cemeteries served as America's first public parks. In a single season in the 1840s, before America's urban centers had parks, an estimated 60,000 New Yorkers made the long trek to Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn for picnics and other forms of recreation. This phenomenon prompted the landscape architect and public-parks advocate Andrew Jackson Downing to write in 1849, "Does not this general interest, manifested in these cemeteries, prove that public gardens . . . would be equally successful?" The eventual result of his campaign was the creation of the first public park in America, New York's Central Park.

Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist
Yalom is a cultural historian; her son, Reid, is an author and photographer. Together they have produced a curious, interesting, and surprisingly moving examination of the American practices of death ceremonies and burial ranging from pre-Jamestown Native American burial mounds to our contemporary, industrialized methods. The well-written text covers a variety of topics, including class and racial distinctions in cemeteries, religious tensions engendered by the building of a Muslim cemetery after 9/11, and an examination of how municipalities are coping with overcrowded burial sites. But it is the remarkable collection of more than 60 photographs that is likely to stir emotions. These include haunting images of lonely crosses at a Spanish mission, rows of well-manicured gravesites in California, and ancient tombstones with barely legible epitaphs at a Jewish cemetery in South Carolina. Both general readers and those with a specific interest in this unusual subject should find value in this work. --Jay Freeman

Customer Reviews

Cultural History Joyride
"Where do you bury?" This question at the end of the first chapter of Marilyn Yalom's The American Resting Place epitomizes this readable, thought-provoking narrative. It is one of hundreds of tidbits of observation, research, and lore that together make this book a bracing feast of cultural history, and more. Yalom's deep compassion for the human condition is leavened with spritely curiosity, sharp intelligence, and understated humor. And that's just the text. The American Resting Place offers readers an extraordinary visual and tactile bonus in the beautiful photographs by Reid Yalom. These black-and-white prints, reproduced in high-quality, glossy plates, at once illustrate the text and stand alone as chiaroscuro masterworks of past and present, life and death, irony and hope.

Like the best cultural historians, Yalom finds the universe in a grain of sand - from the ancient mounds of Native Americans to Ground Zero. In between, we are taken on a strange yet satisfyingly concatenated journey that spans four centuries of American history, one grounded, necessarily, in geography. We hopscotch with the Conquistadores from Florida to New Mexico. Through the burial customs employed - tombstones or not, permanent graves or lost bodies - we experience great waves of history, famine and plenty, natural disasters, catastrophic epidemics, the dominions and disappearances of different religions. In one burial ground in Charleston, Yalom describes stones marking the graves of Jews of a strict Orthodox Sephardic tradition that, strange to think, included veterans of the Revolutionary, 1812, and Civil Wars. Strong as is that Jewish tradition, it is muddled by secular and Christian funerary motifs. Similarly, Christian and African iconography decorates graves in rural Georgia.

Yalom's background as an art historian turns seeming miscellany into keys to whole, buried cultures. More often than not, cultural contrasts erupt around the ways we treat our dead. Yalom highlights this irony with poignancy - the dead of different faiths, races, and eras are all at rest. It is the ways the restless living strive to ameliorate pain and passage into the unknown that make the American cemetery a fascinating historical record, and in the hands of a writer like Yalom, a delightful read.

Fascinating cultural history
I was first drawn to this book by the cover: peaceful photograph and arresting title. Then came the photographs, both haunting and beautiful. Then the big surprise was how quickly I became engaged in the way religion, culture and the cemetery intertwine. Using the American resting place as the constant, Marilyn manages to teach so much about where we all came from and the changes that bring us to the present moment. Cemeteries may seem boring (not at night), but this book brings them alive in a way that is fascinating and educational. The American Resting Place is not just for the academic or intellectual. Everyone will come away better off for having read it. Don't miss this book!

Resting with the Photographs
There are several reviews here about the Yaloms' (mother and son) book on American cemeteries. Since the reviews focus principally on the text, I wanted to take a moment to discuss the moving black and white photographs by Reid Yalom, a photographer from San Francisco.

First of all, it was a wise decision to place the photographs in a distinct portfolio in the front of the book. In this way, they avoid becoming only dispersed illustrations for Marilyn's well-written text. The photographs are historical documents, of course, but they are so much more. Each image stands regally on its own, framed by a skillful and sensitive fine art photographer.

Take a moment to meander through the portfolio of images-- letting go of the details about where and when, much as you would stroll through these cemeteries themselves on a quiet Sunday afternoon. After all, the cemetery AND the photograph are places to meander, to explore, to meditate and to REST. Resting your eyes and thoughts on one of Reid's poetic images gives the viewer an opportunity to reflect.

There is as much life in these images of graves and cold stones as there is death. Reid has managed to inject a feeling for a live human presence to spite the fact that there is only one image with a live human figure, Plate 46. In perusing these photographs, we feel a warm human spirit circling around, not some eerie ghost of the past, but a strong immediate presence of those who are our loved ones. Through Reid's choice of sparkling light on stone (Plate 42 for example), through the artful presentation of photographs and drawings of those buried on the graves (Plate 44 as example), and through the dramatic images of statuary (the last Plate 64 especially), we feel the strong continuation of the souls who are resting here. In this final photograph of statuary, Kate Tracy and her mother, their arms wrapped around each other are offering comfort to those of us alive who are walking there and facing the inevitability of our own mortality.


Plate 52, Spirit trail, is my favorite image. At first it seems so lonely but then, as I rest my eye on the path, I feel a presence--surprisingly, that of myself walking the stony road accompanied by my own spirit into the rest of my life.

Wander through these photographs. You will not regret it. They are thoughtfully composed with an eye for the way nature, stone, and human spirit can combine--especially when brought together by an artist like Reid Yalom.