{"product_id":"http-books-google-com-books-id-9ezrcgaaqbaj-dq-isbn-9780820346892-hl-source-gbs_api","title":"American Afterlife: Encounters in the Customs of Mourning","description":"\u003cp\u003eAn award-winning writer explores the patchwork American cultural history of grieving the departed. One family inters their matriarch’s ashes on the floor of the ocean. Another holds a memorial weenie roast each year at a green-burial 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 where 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 are personally involved with death: obit writers in the desert, an Atlantic funeral voyage, a fourth-generation funeral director―even a midwestern museum that shows us our death-obsessed Victorian progenitors. Each story illuminates details in another, revealing a landscape that feels at once strange and familiar, one that’s by turns odd, tragic, poignant, and sometimes even funny. “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\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eAuthor(s):\u003c\/strong\u003e Kate Sweeney\u003cbr\u003e\u003cstrong\u003ePublisher:\u003c\/strong\u003e University of Georgia Press\u003cbr\u003e\u003cstrong\u003ePublished:\u003c\/strong\u003e 2014-03-15\u003cbr\u003e\u003cstrong\u003ePages:\u003c\/strong\u003e 232\u003cbr\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eCategories:\u003c\/strong\u003e Social Science\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"University of Georgia Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":62682738000243,"sku":"9780820346892","price":320.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0987\/0812\/8115\/files\/content_0a3acd88-d615-49af-82fb-13b64061fddc.jpg?v=1775321257","url":"https:\/\/readaura.store\/products\/http-books-google-com-books-id-9ezrcgaaqbaj-dq-isbn-9780820346892-hl-source-gbs_api","provider":"Read Aura","version":"1.0","type":"link"}