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American Afterlife: Encounters in the Customs of Mourning, by Kate Sweeney
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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 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 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 death-obsessed 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.
- Sales Rank: #577068 in Books
- Brand: Sweeney, Kate
- Published on: 2014-03-15
- Released on: 2014-03-15
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.50" h x 5.75" w x .75" l, .95 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 232 pages
Review
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. Her book braces and emboldens our eschatological nerve―a reliable witness and wellwrought litany to last things and final details. (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. As we look into the grave, she looks at us, with an unflinching gaze that would be the envy of Jessica Mitford. Revelatory and―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)
As radio reporter and producer Sweeney notes in this unsettling, compassionate volume on American mourning customs, death was once a ubiquitous part of American life; the Victorians raised mourning to an art form. . . . Her stories originate mostly in the South, but have universal relevance. Sweeney writes with a deft touch and with empathy for mourners, whose stories she relays with clarity and care. (Publishers Weekly)
From WABE reporter-producer Sweeney comes a funny, edifying American road trip that bears witness to our most revealing and eccentric funerary customs. (Gina Webb Atlanta Journal-Constitution)
[Sweeney's] enthusiasm . . . makes American Afterlife such an entertaining read. In the face of oblivion, Sweeney doesn't miss the occasional chance to marvel at life. . . . Sweeney makes no pretension of grappling with the totality of death. But through the constellation of her details we begin to see the practical shape, that thing we will only fully understand when we all inevitably meet it. (Wyatt Williams Creative Loafing ("20 People to Watch in 2014"))
Respectfully illuminating both the ludicrousness and the significance of mourning and its accompanying memorialization rituals, Sweeney reports the unsavory details alongside the poignancy of grief and sorrow. 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 Reviews)
Sweeney's wicked sense of humor renders the topic of death not so scary, and her good-natured affection for the obsessives, the oddballs, and the entrepreneurs in the dismal trade make her a bewitching tour guide. (Teresa Weaver Atlanta Magazine)
About the Author
KATE SWEENEY is a producer for NPR affiliate WABE 90.1 FM in Atlanta, Georgia. She has won five Edward R. Murrow awards and two Associated Press awards for her work.
Most helpful customer reviews
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
Only remotely historical and very filled with personal anecdotes
By The Barefoot Reviewer
Every once in a while I actually pay money for a book and in this case I rather wish I hadn't. Usually I go into a "positives vs negatives" analysis on books but in this case I think I'll opt for more of a "this is what this book is" concept.
Firstly, what I expected was hard non-fiction. I wanted a tightly-connected book that described the history of funeral practices in some level of detail. Instead what this book gives you is a rather loose cobbling together of a few historical tidbits and a surprising amount of memoir. Imagine something of the form, "roadside memorials have become increasingly popular; Steve built a roadside memorial in 1976 when his wife died in a terrible accident. She was blonde-haired and blue-eyed and stood 5'8 with a wispy figure and a penchant for pancakes that would make any man weak in the knees." OK, I'm making all that up but that's the general form we're talking about. The book seems to be about 15% history, 15% current day practices and 70% personal anecdote from the author's time writing the book. It's well-written certainly and entertaining in some ways but it's completely not what I expected when I plunked hit the 'buy' button.
The second important thing to know is that the book is not really terribly historical. The first chapter talks about funeral practices of days gone by from hair jewelry to cooling boards but the second chapter is about memorial tattoos and from there we're very much stuck in the present day. So this is a book about TODAY and only remotely historical.
In summary, it's entirely possible that you'll love this book. The author is a good writer and entertaining in a certain sense of the word but you should not buy this book with the idea that it's going to teach you much about the history of the mourning process. It contains a plethora of anecdotes both relevant and not; some entertaining and some not but if you, like I was, are just looking for an exploration of the morbid history of how we deal with those most final of destinations.... this isn't that book. Mary Roach's "Stiff" is probably more your cup of tea.
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It's my endeavor to write reviews that are, above all, helpful to you as you make a buying decision. If I've accomplished that then great! If I've failed you in some way then please leave a comment letting me know what you would want to know. I'm always ready to improve my reviews and your feedback is a key component of that. thanks for reading this far!
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Well written and insightful
By KaelinCB
This book is not about the supernatural. It's not about ghosts or near-death experiences. The afterlife to which Kate Sweeney refers belongs to those of us who go on living after the death of a loved one. The first chapter is chock-full of interesting and odd facts about the history and evolution of the funeral business and mourning practices. Kate then shares with us some of the unusual ways contemporary Americans mourn and memorialize their dearly departed, and she does so without imparting opinion, endorsement, or judgment, but rather with deft insight and reverence. She also shares interviews with people who work in some facet of the mourning industry. Their jobs are a bit odd, but they do what they do because they are needed, and because mourning isn’t really an industry as much as it is a fact of life. Buy it. Read it.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
'American Afterlife' an eloquent survey
By Bradley Weismann
What is the landscape of death and mourning in America? Given our potpourri of cultural traditions, the general ebb of religious impulses, and the uniquely American terror of aging and mortality, it’s difficult at best to sketch an outline of it. However, if anyone can delineate its dimensions, it is Kate Sweeney.
“In a sense, death in today’s America is always unexpected. Even when it’s not a literal surprise, it has a power, when first encountered, to deeply jar people who have come of age bathed in the deep unspoken conviction: This is not what is supposed to happen to us. To me. Like those strange dreams in which we find ourselves pushing open the door of a wing of our house we didn’t know existed but now realize was there all along . . . “
Combining the thoroughness of a beat reporter with the skill of an eminently readable social historian, she sets out a clear and densely factual assessment of mourning practices, punctuated with vibrant portraits of such industry-related individuals as a memorial tattoo artist, a funeral chaplain, an obituary writer, an online baroness of crematory appliances, and a photographer who has made memorial portraits of deceased newborns.
Sweeney’s ability to listen and judiciously present leads to a plethora of diverse voices coming through, loud and clear – but it does not exempt an appropriate and apt amount of personal statements by the author in relation to the subject.
Sweeney’s abundance of historical detail contextualizes the state of the art today. The Puritans had no funeral ceremonies – they buried their dead in silence. (They did, however, love to compose funeral elegies.) The double sweep of the evangelical Second Great Awakening and the rise of gloomy, death-obsessed Romanticism led to a revolution in the consideration of death and in the commemoration of the dead. Graveyards became cemeteries; undertakers became funeral directors. In Christendom, at least, the rituals of mourning, the length of the mourning period, and sumptuary customs as rigid as though regulated by law.
Another shift Sweeney clocks is that of the casting aside of Victorian era’s thanatological obsessions in response to the wholesale slaughters of World War I. Multigenerational families, long the norm in American life, began to fragment. Old people were a newly segregated underclass. The aged no longer died at home but in rest homes, nursing homes, retirement homes, old folks’ homes, senior centers . . . Likewise, the body didn’t sit up all night on sawhorses in the front parlor.
Sweeney’s travels lead her to folks who can shoot your remains into space, on put some of you into a necklace or brooch (the Victorian-era funeral jewelry making a comeback!), or bury you in a nature preserve in a wicker basket, or do it “right,” the old-fashioned way, complete with a top-line casket (aka coffin), makeup and fine clothes for the deceased, a viewing, a funeral, a burial. (Thanks to Sweeney, I finally understand the transition from funeral chapel to funeral parlor to funeral home to funeral service. Did you ever wonder why your childhood funeral homes always seemed to be Victorian mansions? “The large houses provided social prominence, expansive living areas upstairs for the directors’ families, and large basements that were ideal for embalming.” Shiver.)
The stats point to a marked increase in cremations and a decline in funeral ceremonies. All aspects of the American death industry are in flux. Like many others, it has undergone a radical consolidation in recent years, one largely overlooked. The old-school family businesses are falling to corporate protocol. Meanwhile, the market fragmentation has led to a lot of non-standard, cut-out-the-middleman approaches toward the care and deposition of the dead, and the observances and needs of the mourning. Even a seeming firefight between obituary writers and their enthusiasts fades to nothing as market realities destroy the beat. Death is certain, but a business model never is.
Sweeney describes funerals as “intricate events involving emotional people.” The daunting, morbid territories she has explored were no less challenging, and she brought us back an eloquent and sharply limned map of them.
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