After the Funeral: The Posthumous Adventures of Famous Corpses
10 best books like After the Funeral: The Posthumous Adventures of Famous Corpses (Edwin Murphy): Cranioklepty: Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius, The Victorian Celebration of Death, The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries, Nine Years Under: Coming of Age in an Inner-City Funeral Home, Grave Matters: A Journey Through the Modern Funeral Industry to a Natural Way of Burial, Death to Dust: What Happens to Dead Bodies, The Big Book of Death, Postmortem: How Medical Examiners Explain Suspicious Deaths, Buried Alive: The Terrifying History of Our Most Primal Fear, The Empire of Death: A Cultural History of Ossuaries and Charnel Houses
| Author | Colin Dickey |
| ISBN | 1932961860 |
The after-death stories of Franz Joseph Haydn, Ludwig Beethoven, Swedenborg, Sir Thomas Browne and many others have never before been told in such detail and vividness.
Fully illustrated with some surprising images, this is a fascinating and authoritative history of ideas carried along...
The Victorian Celebration of Death
| Author | James Stevens Curl |
| ISBN | 0750938730 |
In this beautifully illustrated and well-researched book Professor Curl has rescued much fascinating material from undeserved oblivion, and his work fills a genuine gap. From humble working-class exequies to the massive outpouring of grief at the State funerals of Wellington and Queen Victoria...
The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries
| Author | Marilyn Johnson |
| ISBN | 0060758767 |
Marilyn Johnson was enthralled by the remarkable lives that were marching out of this world—so she sought out the best obits in the English language and the people who spent their lives writing about the dead. She surveyed the darkest corners of Internet chat rooms, and made a pilgrimage to London...
| Author | Sheri Booker |
| ISBN | 1592407129 |
Six Feet Under
meets The Wire in a dazzling and darkly comic memoir about coming-of-age in a black funeral home in Baltimore
Sheri Booker was only fifteen years old when she started working at Wylie Funeral Home in West Baltimore. She had no idea that her summer job would become nine years of...
| Author | Mark Harris |
| ISBN | 0743277686 |
By the time Nate Fisher was laid to rest in a woodland grave sans coffin in the final season of "Six Feet Under, " Americans all across the country were starting to look outside the box when death came calling."Grave Matters" follows families who found in "green" burial a more natural, more economic, and...
| Author | Kenneth V. Iserson |
| ISBN | 1883620228 |
Death - The 500 pound Gorilla in the room. People that are curious what happens to humans after death will want to read this book. We love to live by not facing the final page of our lives. This book is not for the faint hearted, people that think that enbalming will preserve the body forever, or people that...
| Author | Bronwyn Carlton |
| ISBN | 1563891662 |
As I make my way through DC imprint Paradox Press' Big Books Of . . ., The Big Book of Death (the third in the series) didn't quite hold up to rereading the way I expected. To a great extent, it was as offbeat and as enlightening as I remembered, but as I've matured, some of the obvious flippancy about what should...
Postmortem: How Medical Examiners Explain Suspicious Deaths
| Author | Stefan Timmermans |
| ISBN | 0226803996 |
As elected coroners were replaced by medical examiners with scientific training, the American public became fascinated with their work. From the grisly investigations showcased on highly rated television shows like CSI to the bestselling mysteries that revolve around forensic science, medical...
Readers of Edgar Allan Poe's tales—just think of The Premature Burial—may comfort themselves with the notion that Poe must have exaggerated: surely people of the 1800s could not have been at risk of being buried alive? But such stories filled medical journals as well as fiction, and fear in the...
The Empire of Death: A Cultural History of Ossuaries and Charnel Houses
| Author | Paul Koudounaris |
| ISBN | 0500251789 |
It is sometimes said that death is the last taboo, but it was not always so. For centuries, religious establishments constructed decorated ossuaries and charnel houses that stand as masterpieces of art created from human bone. These unique structures have been pushed into the footnotes of history;...
Never look at a grave the same way again Admit it: You're fascinated by cemeteries. We all die, and for most of us, a cemetery is our final resting place. But how many people really know what goes on inside, around, and beyond them?
Enter the world of the dead as Katherine Ramsland talks to mortuary...
| Author | Penny Colman |
| ISBN | 0805050663 |
Drawing on extensive historical and anthropological research, personal accounts, and interviews with people who work in the funeral industry, Penny Colman examines the compelling subjects of death and burial across cultures and societies. The text, enriched with stories both humorous and poignant,...
The Whole Death Catalog: A Lively Guide to the Bitter End
| Author | Harold Schechter |
| ISBN | 0345499646 |
In the tradition of Mary Roach’s bestselling Stiff and Jessica Mitford’s classic exposé, The American Way of Death, comes this meticulously researched, refreshingly irreverent, and lavishly illustrated look at death from acclaimed author Harold Schechter. With his trademark fearlessness...
Stories in Stone: A Field Guide to Cemetery Symbolism and Iconography
| Author | Douglas Keister |
| ISBN | 1567317766 |
Stories in Stone provides history along with images of a wide variety of common and not-so-common cemetery symbols, and offers an in-depth examination of stone relics and the personal and intimate details they display-flora and fauna, religious icons, society symbols, and final impressions of...
| Author | Cedric A. Mims |
| ISBN | 0312264119 |
An unusually comprehensive study of death as both a social and scientific phenomenon, When We Die is as frank as it is informed. This far-reaching discussion considers mortality from the personal and the universal perspective, generously citing past and present poets and physicians from a diverse...
Panati's Extraordinary Endings of Practically Everything and Everybody
| Author | Charles Panati |
| ISBN | 0060962798 |
Charles Panati, America's favorite gatherer of origins, now offers the last word on how people, places, and things of all sorts have met their ends through the centuries. From famous presidents to frightening epidemics, from ancient extinctions to vanished vogues, from bizarre last wills to the...
Rest in Peace: A Cultural History of Death and the Funeral Home in Twentieth-Century America
Though it has often been passionately criticized--as fraudulent, exploitative, even pagan--the American funeral home has become nearly as inevitable as death itself, an institution firmly embedded in our culture. But how did the funeral home come to hold such a position? What is its history? And...
| Author | H.P. Newquist |
| ISBN | 0312540620 |
Have you been attacked by a great white shark? Gone over Niagara Falls in a barrel? Been exposed to anthrax? No, you haven't, or you'd be dead. This Will Kill You reveals the intriguing facts behind the many ways humans bite the dust in encounters with deadly bugs, hungry predators, natural disasters,...
The hereafter may still be part of the great unknown, but with Six Feet Blunder, you can unearth the rich--and often, dark--history of funeral rites. From getting a portrait painted with a loved one's ashes to purchasing a safety coffin complete with bells and breathing tubes, this book takes you on...
Where Are They Buried?: How Did They Die? Fitting Ends and Final Resting Places of the Famous, Infamous, and Noteworthy
| Author | Tod Benoit |
| ISBN | 1579122876 |
This enlightening and browsable guide features more than 500 profiles of the lives, deaths, and final resting places of our most influential figures from sports, music, film, television, literature, and politics.
This unparalleled compilation of profiles of the deceased--from Abbott...
| Author | Michael Largo |
| ISBN | 0061231665 |
No matter what your station in society, everybody has to go sometime. Even the wealthy, powerful, and world-renowned must ultimately meet their Maker—though some have departed this life more ignobly than they might have wished.
From Mozart to rock and roll, which performers ended their...
Morbid Curiosity: The Disturbing Demises of the Famous and Infamous
| Author | Alan W. Petrucelli |
| ISBN | 0399535276 |
"It's shocking and sinful, and I couldn't put it down!" -Joan Rivers
The strange, startling, and utterly fascinating stories behind the world's most notorious celebrity deaths.
Was Jayne Mansfield really decapitated? Which manly appendage of Napoleon's was cut off during his...
| Author | Robert D. Webster |
| ISBN | 1600080715 |
A funeral director reflects on 30 years of serving the living and the deceased while providing us with a behind-the-scenes story told with both empathy and humor. He attempts to assuage our curiosity and answer those questions that are uppermost in our minds when faced with death, including: - How do...
| Author | Malcolm Forbes |
| ISBN | 0345362500 |
I chose the book because I was interested in the history on important people in History and how they lived in order to get to where they were and what lead to their demise. What also made the book catch my eye was that it was short stories and I have a short attention span sometimes so I knew it was perfect. The...
