The Book of Resting Places: A Personal History of Where We Lay the Dead, Hardcover

Descriere

``Mira y Lopez's first book is a thoughtful, intriguing collection of 10 personal essays dealing with the dead and where they end up . . . These are wide-ranging and often tender meditations on death.`` --Kirkus Reviews In the aftermath of his father's untimely death and his family's indecision over what to do with the remains, Thomas Mira y Lopez be-came obsessed with the type and variety of places where we lay the dead to rest. The re-sult is a singu-lar collection of essays that weaves together history, mythology, journalism, and personal narrative into the author's search for a place to process grief. Mira y Lopez explores unusual hallowed grounds--from the world's larg-est cryonics institute in southern Arizona to a set of Roman catacombs being digested by modern bacteria, to his family's burial plots in the mountains outside Rio de Janeiro to a nineteenth-century desert cemetery that was relocated for the building of a modern court-house. The Book of Resting Places examines these over-looked spaces and what they tell us about our-selves and the passing of those we love--how we grieve them, and how we attempt to forget them.